I purchased this book based on the customer reviews on Amazon, and was expecting this book to be full of interesting information about the 1950s. It was certainly full of interesting information about the 1950s, but I felt that Mr. Halberstam wrote this book with a jaundiced eye towards the 1950s. To be fair, when one tackles a subject as broad as an examining an entire decade, there is simply too much material for one to cover every single detail, and so one must be selective in which aspect one chooses to include in such an overview. However, I felt that this book was quite biased, because it tended to present various liberal figures in a very positive light (for example, Margaret Sanger, who, I might point out, strongly promoted eugenics, something the Nazis also not only promoted but actively practiced) while tending to present various conservative figures in a negative light.
While there certainly were some things in 1950s America that merit criticism, I felt that Mr. Halberstam overlooked many good things that happened in America during the 1950s. For example, Dr. Jonas Salk successfully produced a polio vaccine, which was then administered to an entire generation of school children, and led directly to the virtual eradication of polio, a disease that caused much dread among generations of children and parents. Or consider Sputnik. While Mr. Halberstam did a good job of reporting public reaction to Russia's launch of Sputnik (and later, Sputnik 2 and her successors) as well as the various highly public and embarassing failures of the American space program to launch satellites in response, I felt that Mr. Halberstam would have done well to also include the fact that the soul-searching among Americans in the wake of Sputnik lead directly to large amounts of money being pumped into public schools to better educate American schoolchildren in math and science, an investment that produced an entire generation of talented scientists in the following decades. And as a final example, I would mention that Mr. Halberstam largely left out the surge in church attendance that occurred during the 1950s, as well as the evangelistic efforts of Billy Graham, which had the overall effect of bringing Evangelical Christianity out of the self-imposed ghetto they were in during the first half of the 20th Century, and making it a very respectable part of American culture during the middle and later part of the 20th Century.
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Customer reviews
A Great Insight Into a Decade That Changed America
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2020
Someone should have commissioned David Halberstam to write books summarizing each decade in recent history. The acclaimed author shares stories that highlighted the decade from politics to cultural issues. He describes the Cold War Korea and Vietnam but also looks at the significance of the desegregation, the sexual revolution and the Feminist movement. He looks at the significance of the auto industry and how it changed from providing basic transportation to being a status symbol. We learn about the politics inside the White House during critical moments as well as how leisure time changed.Academics might argue that the book isn’t about history, but it shares enough stories that allow you to get a sense of how the nation changed during the decade. If I was writing high school curriculum, I would assign this book to students and then a more academic book. Students would benefit from both versions.
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2020
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Amazon Customer
A surprising decade
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2021Erik Petersson
Good account of the USA in the 50's
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2020SixGC
A brilliant overview of USA in the1950s
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2018
Overseas Reviewer
Excellent American History
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2006
