Thanks for your piece on David Halberstam, one of my favorite writers, and my all-time favorite sports book writer.

Thanks too for the book excerpt. It certainly reminded me of how well Halberstam wrote.

But the excerpt also gave another insight into the man- he seemed always to be fascinated by transitions, those moments before irreversible change.

He captured that period between the time America believed in, then realized the quagmire that was the Vietnam War.

He chronicled the time when Japan was emerging as a giant in automobile production.

He chose the Summer of 49′ , as if to liken the purity of American baseball during those times with the soon-to-be-lost innocence of pre-Vietnam war America

He wrote about a champion basketball team in Breaks of the Game, during their post-championship decline

Somehow he captured the excitement of an eagle about to take flight, as well as the tension of precious crystal about to fall off the edge of a table.

I still have his book on Michael Jordan: “Playing for Keeps : Michael Jordan and the World He Made”. Plus all those retrospectives he made with the NBA. He will be missed.

[…] to fall. Placeholder looks at the Jeffersonian and Madisonian models for economic development. In Inquirer Current, John Nery pays tribute to David […]

Like you, John, Summer of ‘49 was my first introduction to David Halberstam, and it was a wonderful look into the pennant race for that year, when the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out for American League supremacy all the way to the end of the season.

Halberstam and his creative prose will be missed.

“Has anyone in Philippine journalism been inspired enough to actually make a career writing journalistic books?”

I can think of a few who devoted chunks of their careers to producing journalistic books: Marties Vitug wrote a landmark book on logging, Power from the Forest, before writing two other non-fiction books on southern Philippines;
Cris Yabes wrote Boys from the Barracks, about coup plotters, then Journey of Scars, a personal memoir of her travels, and another book on the vanishing script of the Pala’wan; and Conrado de Quiroz of course wrote Dead Aim, a book about martial law that was almost as ambitious as a Halberstam book and a pretty good read too.