War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals » (1st Edition)

One of the most popular and imitated nonfiction writers around, David Halberstam wrote books that fused narrative storytelling with investigative reporting. The result: stories that hummed with energy and authority and reads as well as -- if not better than -- some novels.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam chronicles Washington politics and foreign policy in post Cold War America.

Book Magazine

Bill Clinton, who wasn't particularly interested in foreign affairs and effortlessly persuaded the voters that it didn't matter, ended up spending much of his presidency grappling with three of the most intractable foreign-policy crises of the '90s: ethnic warfare in the Balkans, violent chaos in Africa and a bloody stalemate in the Middle East. As historical ironies go, that's a doozy. But Halberstam's book doesn't quite rise to the occasion, though it is full of interesting things (such as the acute observation that by cutting back on their foreign-news coverage in the '80s, the TV networks became "essentially isolationist, or neo-isolationist, both reflecting and at the same time increasing the nation's self-absorption"). That's part of the problem—it's too full. This is the sort of book that publicists call "epic," meaning that it wanders all over the place and trails off inconclusively at the end. As for the smoothly portentous drone of Halberstam's Pulitzer Prize-winning prose style, suffice it to say that the book would be a lot more readable if it contained fewer sentences like "Events, George Ball wrote in one of his dove papers on Vietnam just before the fateful commitment of American combat troops, quoting from Emerson, are in the saddle and ride mankind." Doesn't anybody edit manuscripts anymore?
—Terry Teachout