Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter

David Halberstam’s no stranger to writ­ing big books about big wars, and he report­ed­ly thought of his final work, The Cold­est Win­ter: Amer­i­ca and the Kore­an War, as a “book­end” to his clas­sic on Viet­nam, The Best and the Bright­est. The book comes out this week with a very unusu­al pub­lic­i­ty blitz.

Hal­ber­stam died in a car crash last spring and so, remark­ably, a group of his friends are doing a pub­lic­i­ty tour for him. Authors like Joan Did­ion, Sey­mour Hersh, Bob Wood­ward and Anna Quindlen are tak­ing up legs of the gru­el­ing pub­lic­i­ty trek in hon­or of Hal­ber­stam. Accord­ing to the New York Times they will be “offer­ing per­son­al rem­i­nis­cences and read­ings” in an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of festschrift and pro­mo­tion. The tour will start on Tues­day and run until Octo­ber 15^th. In the words of Sy Hersh, “Lis­ten, ain’t noth­ing like David — you don’t need this to keep David alive. You’ve got to mar­ket a book, let’s mar­ket a book, but he tran­scends that. He was a great war reporter and a great base­ball reporter, and the most loy­al per­son in the world.”

Relat­ed: See our piece from April, David Halberstam’s Last Speech and Sup­per.

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