Salem State College Series

David Halberstam
"Lore and Legends: The Boston Red Sox"

Tuesday
April 5, 2005
8:00 p.m.

Already a Pulitzer Prize winner at age 30 for his insightful and prophetic reporting on the Vietnam War, author David Halberstam has won both commercial and critical acclaim throughout his long and prolific journalism career. His subjects have ranged from media (The Powers That Be), the effect of Japan on our global economy (The Reckoning), the civil rights movement (The Children) and the evolution of the war in Vietnam (The Best and The Brightest), and he has often been referred to as one of the fairest and most non-judgmental chroniclers of the century in which we live. "The Washington Post" once referred to him as "the journalist as a samurai" for his aggressive quest for the truth.

Five of Halberstam's bestsellers have dealt with sports, including Summer of '49, which depicts the epic pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox, and Playing For Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made. His last 13 books have all been New York Times bestsellers, and The Reckoning was voted "the most important book of the year" in a Wall Street Journal poll of 400 CEOs. Halberstam's latest national bestsellers are Firehouse, a chronicle of Manhattan's Engine 40, Ladder 35, which lost 12 of its 13 firefighters in the attacks on the World Trade Center, and Teammates, a nostalgic look at the 60-year friendship between Red Sox greats Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr and North Shore resident Johnny Pesky.

David Halberstam graduated from Harvard University and began his career as a reporter on local newspapers in Mississippi and Tennessee before joining the New York Times in 1960. He rose to prominence in the early sixties as one of only a handful of reporters who refused to accept the official line and reported instead that the war was lost. According to Bob Woodward, David Halberstam is "the journalistic father to those of us who went into journalism because of what he did in Vietnam."

The recipient of numerous awards and over 20 honorary degrees, Halberstam appears frequently on "Nightline," "Charlie Rose" and "Face the Nation."