Authors To Tour In Place of David Halberstam

Posted on September 4, 2007

This is a pretty cool thing: Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Alex Kotlowitz, Paul Hendrickson, Samantha Power and Bill Walton have banded together and are going on the book tour that author David Halberstam had planned before his untimely death in a car accident this past April. Halberstam's friends and colleagues will book tour in his place and recall his life and works. The tour is for The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, which arrives in stores on Sept. 25

At each engagement Mr. Halberstam's "surrogates," as Mr. Woodward calls them, will pay tribute to him, a best-selling author of books like The Best and the Brightest and Summer of '49, by offering personal reminiscences and readings. It took Mr. Halberstam 10 years to do the reporting and to write the book, which he called, in a term familiar to librarians and football fans, a "bookend" to his Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Vietnam.
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The idea for the tour was Hyperion's, said Mr. Halberstam's widow, Jean. "Then someone reminded me that when Tony Lukas died just after Big Trouble came out, David organized a number of writers to represent it in bookstores in the Boston area," she said. "David's friends, who are writers, are well aware that getting attention for a book is hard, no matter how well your last one did. They said, 'Whatever I can do - I'll fly to wherever.' He would have felt amazed and humbled, and that�s not necessarily a word used to describe him."

Now that's what we call true friendship: touring to support someone else's book. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War is available for pre-order at Amazon.com.