Product Description

Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history. The Coldest Winter changes that, giving readers a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures -- Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the heart of the book are the individual stories of the soldiers on the front lines who were left to deal with the consequences of the dangerous misjudgments and competing agendas of powerful men. We meet them, follow them, and see some of the most dreadful battles in history through their eyes. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of people asked to bear an extraordinary burden. Contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, The Coldest Winter provides crucial perspective on the Vietnam War and the events of today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #132791 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Review
fine book...delicately balances wide-angle pictures with carefully drawn details. The fascination, however, comes not only from the way in which Korea's conflict played out, but also from the nature of the primary issues: in Korea two superpowers found themselves embroiled in a debacle that lasted longer than anybody imagined.'
--Daily Telegraph

The Sunday Times
'It is a remarkable piece of storytelling, about the first 10 months of the Korean saga...

Birmingham Post
'David Halberstam makes sobering sense of one of modern history's less well-known and less well-understood wars.'

Customer Reviews

Excellent insight into a forgotten war
The necessity for this book is exemplified by the author's experience in a provincial Florida library: when looking at the shelves found it had eighty eight books on the Vietnam War, and only four on Korea.

This is a magisterial single volume history of the American involvement in a major war with Communist China. David Halberstam draws on considerable historical and journalistic skills to follow in the footsteps of Chester Wilmot's Crusade in Europe: the same effortless movement between platoon level experience of single combat to the liaisons and conferences of the chiefs of staff. I was as engaged by the character sketches of key politicians and diplomats as I was by the gripping depiction of close quarter conflict with the Chinese army. The portrait of MacArthur is worthy of Greek tragedy.

This was a highly politicised conflict exposed fault line between soldiers and civilians in the American way of making war. It explores the tension between the American instinct to isolationism and its global responsibilities - and provides sharp contrasts between the outstanding success of the USA in stabilising and securing democracy in post-war Europe with a far more problematic experience in Asia

Some qualifications: if you are a British reader, and your previous reading on the war is centred on Max Hastings and Michael Hickey, then you are likely to be disappointed by the very peripheral treatment of the UN effort outside the US armed forces. I think this is to be expected, but it is a little sad. My major criticism is the very poor index which does very little service to an excellently scholarly and readable book.

The key axis of power in the 21st century is likely to be between the USA and China, and the events of 1950-1953 will remain central to the dynamic of this relationship. This book is a fine tribute to its author who was so tragically killed in a car accident just as it was completed.

Did The Editor go AWOL?
I have a bad or good habit, judge as you will, of pretty much always finishing a book once I've started it. This was tested sorely to the limits with David Halberstams "The Coldest Winter" which I had borrowed from my local Library in the hope of filling in the ample gaps in my knowledge of the Korean War. Instead, within a few score pages, it became apparent that the book had immense and ultimately fatal problems. The fact that there are 650+ pages meant that my reading endurance was tested to its limits.

The amount of clichés is simply astounding as well as a blizzard of trite sound bites, sentimentalism and more than a few dubious judgements. Sentences such as "he passed all kinds of secret tests, and he [Kim Il Sung] was a true believer" appear continuously in the text: the stuff of caricature and they occur with regard to everyone who makes an appearance, from the lowliest soldier to such historical figures as General MacArthur, Harry Truman, Mao and General Ridgeway.

The book is subtitled "America and the Korean War" and I expected that the American contribution to the Korean War would have primacy. What I cannot accept is the utterly miserable amount of space that is given to the Koreans. With the exception of the two leading figures of North and South there is only the odd sentence or paragraph on the Korean people themselves. The reader is left, beyond a few shallow generalities, with little idea of what their experience of the War was. There is not even much in the way of detail regarding how partition happened, or the status of the two Koreas in the period between the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Korean War. The War itself is sometimes glossed over and at other times actions are given in excessive detail, every other soldier seems to get his fifteen cliché ridden sentences of fame.

The analysis at times is a little dubious, for example Truman is quoted as saying "If we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won't take any next steps. But if just stand by, they'll move into Iran and they'll take over the whole Middle East." Truman is speaking about what the Soviets will do if he doesn't intervene in Korea, but Halberstam does not think to add that the Soviets never supported the Greek communists and had left Iran four or so years before under a minimal amount of external diplomatic pressure.

The book does have a few saving graces but could have been cut in half, or even more, and been a fairly reasonable account of the Korean War. The lunacy of General MacArthur: his extreme right wing views and the personality cult that surrounded him are clearly stated, as are the tensions in Washington between the Democrat adminstration and a right wing Republican opposition in the post Chinese Revolution era (with its endless debates about who lost China) and their McCarthyism in full flow. The abrasive relationship between General MacArthur and the Democrats in Government is made reasonably clear and even at times interesting. The role that the pervasive American racism regarding Asians played in underestimating first the North Korean forces and then the Chinese is a persistant theme, though it is merely explicated as being of "that time".

In brief, I think that this is a book with more than a few interesting points to make but they are few and far between and any reader who undertakes the journey will have to wade through an unbelievable amount of trite quotes and clichés. There must surely be a better general history of the Korean War than this book?

great yet a bit of a morass
its an amazing book on shear depth of information and scale, very interesting to read and the political side is well researched and at the same times well written. also so is the the battle sections. I agree to a point about clichés but say anything often enough and it becomes a cliché and people in their day to day tend to talk in clichés. overall I found it insightful, yet a bit over long. some bits gone to in depth for one book, maybe a two volume edition would have been better. sad to hear of the authors death though as I look forward to reading more of his work. my sincere condolences to his family