David Halbertsam

The literary world lost one of its greats with the untimely death of David Halberstam. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is one of those writers whom I always admired for his ability to transcend subjects, whether writing about politics (The Best and The Brightest), American history/pop culture (The Fifties, my favorite of all his books), or myriad other topics. His next project, The Coldest Winter, about the Korean War, is due out in the fall.

That Halberstam also wrote about baseball (and other sports) placed him in the company of George F. Will and Stephen Jay Gould, authors who didn’t consider themselves as above writing about a game despite their reputations as experts in non-sports fields. As a result, they were able to give fans — and non-fans — some though-provoking works on the national pastime.

Halberstam wrote about events that seemed ordinary at first glance, but upon deeper examination were exciting, unnerving, and just a little bit sad. Summer of ’49 (Morrow, 1989) followed the Yankees-Red Sox battle for the American League. And while October 1964 (Villard, 1994) may have been ostensibly about the World Series between the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals, the deeper story was about the decline of the Bronx Bombers, who would not win another pennant for more than a decade, and the national league champs, who, with such stars as Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bob Gibson on their roster, were still fighting battle against bigotry and ignorance.

He also edited The Best American Sportswriting of the Century as well as contributed to countless other sports anthologies.

Then there’s The Teammates: A Portrait of Friendship (Hyperion, 2003), which followed the heartbreaking saga of former Red Sox legends Johnny Pesky, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams during the end of the Splendid Splinter’s life. My review of Teammates is on Bookreporter.com. You can read a sample chapter here.

Some obituaries on Halberstam:

The New York Times
The Times slideshow presentation
ESPN provides this one, along with audio comments from sportswriters John Feinstein and Bob Ryan, as well as selections from Halberstam’s work for ESPN. Sports Illustrated ran the AP obit. I’m sure they will offer something a little more heartfelt over the next few days.
An appreciation from Newsweek‘s Jon Meacham
New York Observer
From Poynter.org, a web site for journalists