The author and I are the same age, both graduated from high school and college the same years. Therefore the fifties for both of use was "our" decade. What amazes me about reading this book, now 50 years later is how much of it went right by me. Of course much was also secret, as the spy planes over the USSR, and "now it can be told". However, not reading many newspapers, with only network tv, concerned with family and job. I just not have been paying attentiong. . I did nor realize the controvery over the H bomb, the possibility McArthur might have led us into nucelar war.

A very, very well written book, that should be pulled out for rereading from time to time. Policy makers would learn a lot, though where we had been might still not affect the future.

I was especially interested in the bit about the cotton picker..both human and mechanical...
It was introduced as part of the topic on the northern migration of the southern black (Obama's wife's family story), but also had a good history of the invention and prefection of the mechanical cotton picker itself, biography of a man named
Rust. I immediately called my friend who manages family farms on the Mississippi and asked about the first time she had seen a cotton picker. About 1965 she said.
When she gave me a tour of her farms she kept commenting on how the people, the white sharecroppers (all white) had left, and there were no more people.
The book is replete with these unexpected details. ( )

For novel research...

A thorough, in-depth investigation into a decade that gets too much credit for being another era of the "good ol' days" when there was much social, cultural, and political turmoil that is responsible for founding the counter-cultural revolution of the sixties. ( )

2591 The Fifties, by David Halberstam (read 1 Apr 1994) This is a 1993 book and what it told about was mostly familiar to me and I cannot say I learned a lot. No footnotes. Very journalistic. No original research. Some of the sociological stuff was new to me: about McDonald's, Korvette, and other businesses of the 1950's. ( )

This is the first book of the late, great David Halberstam's that I read. Wonderful writing into the some light and deep events that happened in the 1950s. I have since read almost all his published works. My favorite historian/reporter. ( )

Fascinating and well written history of this tumultuous decade in American history: Elvis, Marilyn, the H-Bomb, McCarthy, Castro, Rosa Parks, Little Rock, The Feminine Mystique, TV, Sputnik... It all happened in the 50s and Halberstam covers them all and much more. ( )