David Halberstam
I love books. My wife does too.
One of the paramount reasons for our last move was the need for more shelf space for our books. Some people take advantage of their local library, but I would rather own a book that I can refer to when needed or bore my friends with quotes I think they should hear. (We professional gasbags cherish this right.)
Books are a comfort. I'm taking some right now from the David Halberstam tomes I have in my library. I will miss looking forward to his latest effort. He was one of our best in a business where the bench is growing mighty thin. His prose was natural. It had that "cotton candy" quality that makes reading just kind of dissolve into your consciousness and end all too soon.
If you have never read Halberstam, here is a sample of his work from the terrific "Summer of 49", a wonderful tale of that year's pennant race between the Yankees and the Red Sox:
"That summer, I had just turned fifteen years old. Fifteen is a difficult age for a boy anyway, and I was, I think, a less successful fifteen-year-old than most. I was small for my age, thin, and bespectacled. I was not particularly good at things boys are supposed to be good at; instead I was good at things (schoolwork) grown-ups want them to be good at but which, of course, win them no approval from their peers. Naturally enough, I soon solved that dilemma by becoming less skillful at my schoolwork. In 1948, my father suffered the first of two heart attacks, and he recovered only partially. There was a sense of foreboding in our home. There was good reason for it--a year later he died."
As my friends in the newspaper business would say, "he could type some".
Great writers are a gift we can all enjoy. They live on through their work and we can take them down from the shelf whenever we miss them. I'm already missing David Halberstam...one of our very best.
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