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.
