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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781401300524 |
Starring Joan Didion, Bob Woodward, Robert Caro, Anna Quindlen, and Neil Sheehan.
Powells.com Staff Pick
In researching the career of David Halberstam for our next Out of the Book project, I came across a description of the author by Doris Kearns Goodwin that gets to the heart of Halberstam's masterful approach: "A gifted storyteller," she called him. "He told history the way I wish it could always be taught — through vivid portraits of individuals connected to the larger canvas of the society that shaped them."
The Coldest Winter gathers momentum in its early pages from such portraits, and over the course of this complicated, overlooked episode in our history, it never lets up. Halberstam draws so many characters so well — of course we meet Truman, MacArthur, Mao Zedong, and Joseph McCarthy, but it's the bit players who endure in our imaginations through the narrative's lively detail. Major General Oliver Prince Smith, for example, "looked, as Martin Smith wrote, like someone who might have been 'cast in an amateur play as a small town druggist, a man whom older ladies would call nice looking if only he would put on a little weight.'" Back on the home front, meanwhile, Senator Kenneth Wherry, of Nebraska, tells hopeful Americans, "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up until it is just like Kansas City."
When Halberstam finished the book, shortly before he died (he'd been working on it on and off for ten years), he believed it to be the crowning achievement of his career. "A puzzling, gray, very distant conflict," he calls the Korean War in the introduction. In The Coldest Winter, he describes the colliding political forces that created the war and cost, by some estimates, almost two million lives. If World War II established America as a superpower, in the Korean War we first acted like one. How our government, military, media, and citizens adapted to the unfamiliar role, brilliantly captured here by a master of the form, would profoundly impact the fifty-plus years to follow.
Recommended by Dave, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history. The Coldest Winter changes that. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures — Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order.
At the heart of the book are the individual stories of the soldiers on the front lines who were left to deal with the consequences of the dangerous misjudgements and competing agendas of powerful men. We meet them, follow them, and see some of the most dreadful battles in history through their eyes. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of peopleasked to bear an extraordinary burden.
The Coldest Winter is contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, and provides crucial perspective on the Vietnam War and the events of today. It was a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to write. It stands as a lasting testament to one of the greatest journalists and historians of our time, and to the fighting men whose heroism it chronicles.
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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
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eglazier, July 20, 2008 (view all comments by eglazier)
The only other reviewer complained that this book did not detail the whole of the Korean war. There are plenty of those extant, so many that one can almost have a daily log of what transpired in the war itself.
The real value of this book is its detailing of the people involved in the start and conduct of the war; the political scene and that of the high military command.
This was a war dominated by a fool at the military leadership who brought a few other incompetents with him such that they caused the needless deaths of thousands of the UN fighting force. Truly the first rule of war is that young men die, but if we accept that at times there is no choice we at least should be spared those lost because the top commander was an egotisitic fool who , though he thought he did because of his long service in Asia never really understood the Chinese. MacArthur never could imagine that the Chinese and Koreans were like all men, able to fight valiantly and ferociously for something in which they believed, whether it be a man, an idea, or a country. His chief commander in the field, Gen. Almond was an out and out racist and so he could only think of the Chinese as 'laundrymen'. Fortunately we had serving underneath these two fools many fine commanders, as Marine General O.P.Smith whose tactics saved the Marines at the Chosin reservoir and Col. Paul Freeman who followed his instincts and saved his 23rd Infantry regiment from having to run and be slaughtered going through the Gauntlet, the Chinese Army ambush of the 8th Army.
Halberstam also details the political leaders of both sides, Mao, Kim Il Sung, President Truman, terribly underrated in his time, and all the other players in the U.S.; politicians, columnists, publishers, and members of congress both good and bad.
Korea was also my war, though in only a peripheral way. I was a serving USAF officer in a little known army camp , Camp Detrick in Maryland, serving with Army, Navy , Air Force personnel and civilians. My lab contained about 5 civilians, two army enlisted men, an army Lt. and me; all of us doing the same type of work. One of the army enlisted used to complain to me that everyone got paid so much more and we all worked the same type of job. I had to remind him that being here was better than being in Korea.( we met again about 15 years later when we worked together in a company in California)
This book, and many others, tells any reader why Korea was bad; even as wars go it was bad.
For all those for whom history is just 20 or 30 years ago, this book is a look at some of our history that has been forgotten by most. The majority of people in the U.S. know there was WW II, though they may know little about what it was all about, but very few know of Korea and the honor of the UN in actually fighting for its principles. The U.S. was part of that.
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uclajack, September 24, 2007 (view all comments by uclajack)
This book is supposed to be a complete history of the Korean War but it falls far short of that goal. Having fought in Korea at the beginning and the end of the war, I was disappointed that the book devotes very little to what happened after MacArthur is fired in early 1951. The title " The Coldest Winter" fairly sums up the book because it is mainly devoted to explaining what occurred up to and through the route of the UN Forces during the winter of 1950. To that point, the book is fairly thorough and accurate but it only repeats what many other authors have already written.
After the UN forces were driven back by the Chinese deep into South Korea, the UN forces were able to reorganize and launched a major counterattack in early 1951 which Halberstam writes about. But what the book fails to bring out is that in routing the UN forces, the Chinese had suffered heavy losses and did not have the reserves to replace those losses. The UN counter offensive resulted in more heavy losses to the Chinese as they were pushed back into North Korea, particularly on the eastern flank. The entire Chinese front was in such danger or collapsing that the Chinese sought a truce and Pres. Truman's biggest mistake was to agree to the truce. Had the UN rejected the truce offer, the Chinese would have been forced to retreat deep into N. Korea and that would have been a propitious time for the UN to agree to an armistice. Instead, the war went on for over two more years ending on July 28, 1953. It ended then only because a major Chinese offensive designed to push the Marines back across the Imjin River failed and the Chinese again had run out of steam.
Many important battles were fought up until the end which Halberstam fails to even acknowledge, particularly the last battle of Boulder City. But where he really falls short is that he misses all the maneuvering of Pres. Eisenhower to bring the war to an end, how the 25th Division was ordered not to counterattack and retake key outposts in May 1953, and later the First Marine Division was also barred from retaking other key outposts lost to the Chinese in July 1953. The loss of those outposts left the Marines naked on Boulder City and meant that the battle was fought in their front lines instead of 2,000 yards in front of them, and the result was very heavy casualties for the Marines. Except for some blunders by the Chinese, they could have penetrated the lines and driven the UN back across the Imjim River which would have left the Chinese a clear route right into the Korean capital at Seoul. Halberstam apparently was unaware of how significant the last battle was in War.
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Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781401300524
- Subtitle:
- America and the Korean War
- Author:
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Hyperion
- Subject:
- Military - World War II
- Subject:
- United states
- Subject:
- Military - Korean War
- Subject:
- Korean war, 1950-1953
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Publication Date:
- September 25, 2007
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 736
- Dimensions:
- 9.36x6.62x1.92 in. 2.48 lbs.
- Age Level:
- from Al to l0
