Rating: 
Summary: Stunningly comprehensive portrait of America in the 1950s
Review: This is a delightful and encyclopedic survey of the major events and personalities in the United States in the 1950s. The title is, therefore, a bit of a misnomer. The book is not about the decade on a global scale, but merely the fifties in America. Halberstam writes of the decade in a clear, fast-moving prose, and despite the books enormous bulk, is actually a remarkably fast read.Halberstam offers no explicit themes or theses, but if there is an overarching implicit theme, it is the Fifties not as a time of innocence as frequently assumed, but a time of viciousness, meanness, and loss of whatever remaining innocence American might possess. Indeed, the book ends with Eisenhower looking at Nixon and Kennedy, and exclaiming that he didn't like either of them. What THE FIFTIES primarily does is hold up a mirror to the fifties, and reflects the major events and especially the major figures of the decade. In fact, while specific events do receive attention, the book is essentially a succession of character sketches, and even the major events themselves are discussed through focusing on particular individuals. What is amazing is what a satisfactory job Halberstam does of writing about both unfamiliar and famous individuals. By and large, Halberstam deals with just about every major figure one would expect. If I had any complaints--and these would be minor--I would argue that some major art forms received almost no attention in the book. For instance, while he has a full chapter on the bestseller PEYTON PLACE and writes about pulp master Micky Spillane, there is no discussion of any major writers. Nor does he write about cinema in general (though James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe receive attention), or changes in art. Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips receive a chapter, but surprisingly little about the development of rock and roll is mentioned apart from that. I think there are two reasons for this. First, even though the text runs to around 730 excluding notes and index, a book of this scale can't deal with everything. Second, despite the books enormous scope, Halberstam isn't determined to write about every aspect of the fifties, but only on every aspect that was distinctive of the decade and made it unique in comparison to what came before and that led to what would come after. Implicit throughout the book is the question, "What made this decade unique and different?" By the end of the book, the reader will have read about Truman, Ike, Korea, Matt Ridgway, McCarthy, Elia Kazan, Orville Faubus, Holiday Inn, MacDonald's, Little Rock, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the Kinsey report, the development of the Pill, Tennessee Williams, the Dulles brothers, Robert Taft, Adlai Stevenson, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Oppenheimer and Teller and the Super, Hoover, MacArthur, Giap, Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel, the CIA, Levittown, Francis Gary Powers, Werner von Braun, Kelly Johnson, Martin Luther King, Emmitt Till, John Chancellor, Harry Ashmore, Lucy, Milton Berle, and a vast host of other major and minor figures. I recommend this book as strongly as possible both for those who either lived through the decade or through the wake of the decade, or those who no little or nothing about it. At the end of the book, I was convinced that the Fifties was perhaps one of the two or three key decades of the century, and perhaps the decade in which the world we know now, dominated by TV, mass communication, fast food, sexuality, celebrity, massive military expenditures, computers, advertising, and technology, was born.
Rating:
Summary: Very pleased
Review: This is the second of Halberstam's books that I've read. After reading The Children, I decided that he was an author whose work was going to be well worth my time. Having entered the fifties a teenager, but missing most of the last of the decade because I was out of the country and out of touch much of the time from Jan, 1955 to Jan, 1959 because of service in the US Navy, Halberstam's reprise of the late 40s and 50s was tremendously interesting to me. It is especially interesting to note that the Republican Party's obcessions - domestic communism in the 50s and Bill Clinton's sins in the 90s - still do the country great disservice while advancing the cause of freedom and social justice not at all. Halberstam's view that the advent of network television and the camera's coverage of news events, of that which had once been almost the exclusive province of print journalism, changed America's perception of the world and itself. I agree with that as far as it goes. However, "news" coverage as practiced in the 90s and today has little in common with news coverage in the 50s. One wonders, looking at what passes for "news" programs today, where the giants of yeasteryear have gone. Like the wonderful engineers who ruled at General Motors early in the decade, they have been replaced by the "money men" who came to rule GM in the late 50s and to rule television today, whose only interest is in the bottom line, the public interest be damned. The "blandness" of the 50s as viewed by the images of that decade transmitted primarily by the network programing other than news programing from that era, is more than belied by Halberstam's extensive discriptions of the social, political and personal turmoil of a decade when supposedly nothing much happened. As a teenager, I recall the cold terror that an unexpected flash of light on the horizon could elicit. Was it going to be followed by the terrible mushroom cloud which we were all conditioned to expect at any moment? Was there to be a reality check on the "duck and cover" routine practiced by school children, ostensibly developed to ward off the truly devastating effects of the ten megaton Soviet superweapons delivered by one of the missiles with which the USSR was rumored to have "gapped" us? And I recall the anger I felt as a displaced Arkie, far from home in the fall of 1957, and the winter and spring 1958, hearng about the crisis at Central High and reading the graffitti that covered the walls and flat surfaces of the Far East where ever our ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet landed - "What about Little Rock?" and "Yankee, go home!" Because of my Arkansas background, I saw and shared the anger, hurt and humiliation of my black shipmates at those signs as they realized that while they were supposedly protecting freedom around the world, at home their little brothers and sisters, children, parents and grandparents were treated, not so much like second class citizens as like another grossly inferior species with no feelings and few rights. Halberstam describes and analyses it all, the warts and the beauties, the amazing successes and the abominal failures of the "quiet" decade. Each decade should be so lucky as to have an biographer of Halberstam's stature. wfh
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