Great Book
Sports fans who have not yet done so: go read "Summer of '49" by David Halberstam, and then you can stop being ashamed of yourself. It's one of those books that you wish was 100,000 pages long. I flew threw it for about the tenth time this past weekend, and I’m thinking about reading it again; it’s that good. “Teammates,” which is a similar yet different story, is also awesome winter reading. I lost my copy of it somewhere—damn it!
When I was studying for my history degree, I often found myself a lonely defender of Halberstam’s type of history. Academic purists loved to belittle that style of writing in favor of primary sources and weighty academic tomes. I argued that they were completely missing the point. Before digging through primary material, I always found it valuable to turn to a Halberstam-style history first, to gain an immediate sense of the vibrancy and human perspective surrounding an historical event. Halberstam's works were not crafted as textbooks. Rather, they are songs about the experience of people’s lives. Popular histories (by Halberstam, Mailer, Royko, Ambrose, etc.) are akin to Francis Scott Key’s National Anthem. They are not to be taken as strict histories, but rather as stories about history, and there’s significant value in that.
So what if the public actually derives pleasure from reading these slightly more literary works? If they've gained widespread popularity, then they must be more meaningful for ordinary people than dry, academic accounts of names, dates, and numbers. Americans know shockingly little about history, because schooling typically does a terrible job of making the material sparkle. Kids become turned off by history very early on in the educational cycle, because they disregard it as some painful call-and-answer exercise. This is a terrible shame. If academia took a less effete, elitist view of the popular historians, typical Americans would be more inclined to enrich themselves with some great stories about themselves.
That’s just my two cents.
I guess the point is, click over to Amazon and order up some Halberstam. I could hyperlink to it, but they’re not paying me, so f them!
When I was studying for my history degree, I often found myself a lonely defender of Halberstam’s type of history. Academic purists loved to belittle that style of writing in favor of primary sources and weighty academic tomes. I argued that they were completely missing the point. Before digging through primary material, I always found it valuable to turn to a Halberstam-style history first, to gain an immediate sense of the vibrancy and human perspective surrounding an historical event. Halberstam's works were not crafted as textbooks. Rather, they are songs about the experience of people’s lives. Popular histories (by Halberstam, Mailer, Royko, Ambrose, etc.) are akin to Francis Scott Key’s National Anthem. They are not to be taken as strict histories, but rather as stories about history, and there’s significant value in that.
So what if the public actually derives pleasure from reading these slightly more literary works? If they've gained widespread popularity, then they must be more meaningful for ordinary people than dry, academic accounts of names, dates, and numbers. Americans know shockingly little about history, because schooling typically does a terrible job of making the material sparkle. Kids become turned off by history very early on in the educational cycle, because they disregard it as some painful call-and-answer exercise. This is a terrible shame. If academia took a less effete, elitist view of the popular historians, typical Americans would be more inclined to enrich themselves with some great stories about themselves.
That’s just my two cents.
I guess the point is, click over to Amazon and order up some Halberstam. I could hyperlink to it, but they’re not paying me, so f them!
posted by Pat at 12:19 PM
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