The Coldest Winter

(David Halberstam) (2007)

Through the noise of Vietnam and Iraq, we fail to hear and heed the still reverberating conflict in Korea, under armistice since 1953 but technically open.  David Halberstam, in his last book, brilliantly recounts the manoeuvres and ideologies at play, and beyond the recounting of the bloody and appalling battles, informed by a decade’s worth of interviews of the high and the low, and supplemented by excellent maps, shows the political shadows cast by the conflict on American policy, such as the stance vis-á-vis China, only corrected after a generation of isolationism, and the consignment to irrelevance, for almost a decade, of the Democratic Party.  True, it is the book of a journalist, not a historian – but a very great example of high journalism.