Halberstam’s final book published

David Halberstam, the journalist and author whose The Best and the Brightest remains a seminal work on the Vietnam War, died tragically in an auto accident last Spring, just days after sending what would be his final book to the publisher.

That book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, is being released tomorrow. A review in today’s Los Angeles Times:

“The Coldest Winter” incorporates all of that and seems certain to become the standard one-volume history of the Korean War, superseding even Clay Blair’s “The Forgotten War” and Stanley Weintraub’s “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.” What sets Halberstam’s history apart is its stunning array of first-person interviews with Korean War veterans, its lucid evocation of battlefield maneuvers, its crystalline portraits of major figures such as Mao and Kim Il Sung and its description of how Douglas MacArthur’s whole willful — indeed, deceitful — prosecution of the war proved so costly. (Was there ever an American hero of MacArthur’s stature whose image has been so ravaged by history? His deliberate distortion of intelligence to justify his horrifically wrongheaded push to the Yalu River is bound to set contemporary readers’ heads shaking.)

And the New York Times review by Max Frankel:

Combining his typically prodigious research with more than a hundred interviews, Halberstam has graphically (if sometimes tediously) recreated the trench warfare up and down that frozen peninsula, juxtaposing accounts of the petty backstabbing and vainglorious posturing at the Tokyo headquarters of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the catastrophic miscalculations by Truman, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung of North Korea.

The result is an outsize but fascinating epic directed simultaneously to battle buffs and pacifists, history enthusiasts and political moralists. With sometimes numbing detail and elegant maps, it evokes the nobility and crazy heroism of outnumbered American grunts in a dozen of the war’s critical engagements, cinematic scenes that alternate with crisp essays about the mindless way the war began, the reckless way it was managed and the fruitless way it ended.

I’ll probably pick it up tomorrow. . .