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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