Schlesinger & Halberstam: Make Boston Globe's best nonfiction of 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., historian, political insider, and man about town, began his journal entry for March 13, 1968, with a bang: "Here we go again!"
It was the day on which Robert F. Kennedy decided he would enter the Democratic primaries for president, and Schlesinger had been involved in the high-tension huddles leading up to it. "Are you happy about this?" Kennedy asked him. Schlesinger said he was. Kennedy was not convinced. "You have some reservations, don't you?" he demanded.
Kennedy was right. Schlesinger later would explain that his reluctance had "to do with the effect [Kennedy's] decision will have on my plans to get started on volume iv of FDR."
That final volume of the Roosevelt biography never did get written, but in "Journals: 1952-2000," Schlesinger, who died in February, eight months short of his 90th birthday, has left a work of nonfiction that is unlike any other published this year, in its offbeat ruminations on the profound and the gossipy.
Reviewing "Journals," Martin F. Nolan, who covered national politics for the Globe, wrote that Schlesinger provides historic insights and anecdotes that will reverberate through the academy. Schlesinger's "sometimes stirring, occasionally sad, and often sardonic jottings," wrote Nolan, "form a labor-intensive public works project for his fellow historians and biographers. They must now revise and extend the biographies of 10 presidents, plus sundry other pols, literary lights, and the dramatis personae of People magazine." And Schlesinger's "high-octane, off-the-record revelations will likely prompt readers to "murmur 'wow!' at every page."...
Like Schlesinger's "Journals," David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" is the posthumous legacy of a great narrative historian. In his review, historian H. W. Brands said Halberstam "approaches the story of the Korean War like a journalist, but he tells it like a historian," meaning that Halberstam, who died in April at 73 in a car accident, took as his starting point conversations with war veterans, as a reporter would, before working his way to documents and official sources.
Read entire article at Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe
It was the day on which Robert F. Kennedy decided he would enter the Democratic primaries for president, and Schlesinger had been involved in the high-tension huddles leading up to it. "Are you happy about this?" Kennedy asked him. Schlesinger said he was. Kennedy was not convinced. "You have some reservations, don't you?" he demanded.
Kennedy was right. Schlesinger later would explain that his reluctance had "to do with the effect [Kennedy's] decision will have on my plans to get started on volume iv of FDR."
That final volume of the Roosevelt biography never did get written, but in "Journals: 1952-2000," Schlesinger, who died in February, eight months short of his 90th birthday, has left a work of nonfiction that is unlike any other published this year, in its offbeat ruminations on the profound and the gossipy.
Reviewing "Journals," Martin F. Nolan, who covered national politics for the Globe, wrote that Schlesinger provides historic insights and anecdotes that will reverberate through the academy. Schlesinger's "sometimes stirring, occasionally sad, and often sardonic jottings," wrote Nolan, "form a labor-intensive public works project for his fellow historians and biographers. They must now revise and extend the biographies of 10 presidents, plus sundry other pols, literary lights, and the dramatis personae of People magazine." And Schlesinger's "high-octane, off-the-record revelations will likely prompt readers to "murmur 'wow!' at every page."...
Like Schlesinger's "Journals," David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" is the posthumous legacy of a great narrative historian. In his review, historian H. W. Brands said Halberstam "approaches the story of the Korean War like a journalist, but he tells it like a historian," meaning that Halberstam, who died in April at 73 in a car accident, took as his starting point conversations with war veterans, as a reporter would, before working his way to documents and official sources.