Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you buy this book, please read it with a grain of salt! Why? Because Halberstam, a radical Bleeding-Heart Liberal, writes a book about a Conservative decade, and it shows. He spend chapters writing glowing things about Pinkus and "The Pill", Kinsey Reports, and St. John Kennedy, but fails to mention things most important to average Americans at that time. We won the war and saved the world from Facism, and, thanks to FDR and Truman's stupid "Communist Containment" policies, engaged in a 40-year struggle of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Yes, the shadow of FDR did linger at the start of the decade, after he had handed most of Europe over to Russia on a silver platter. The "Truman Doctrine" spiraled into Mao's take-over of China, the failure of support to Chaing Kai-shek, the debacle of Korea, and the set up for Vietnam, which Eisenhower had the sense to keep out of, unlike the JFK/LBJ administrations that followed. In smaller areas, he focuses on the '55 Chevy V8, without mentioning that the Chrysler 300 could leave it in the dust. He dedicates a chapter to Elvis and Sam Phillips, but glosses over Bill Haley's contribution (which goes more deeper than "Rock Around the Clock"), as well as very little about the developoments of BeBop and Cool Jazz. His entire book is filled with the tired Liberal thesis of White Male dominance and bad everything was for everyone else, except for the poor Beatniks and New Age Democrats. He called Whiitaker Chambers as "his own background quite shady" for pointing out Alger Hiss, while lionizing Hiss in the typical "victim" mode Liberals are so good at, while ignoring the horrible truth about Hiss, that he really was a Communist. While this book does have some minor good references to it, it is written in a very strongly Liberal bias and distorts the wonderful '50s far more than I have space to explain. Don't buy this book! However, if you do, just be aware of the many modern Liberal "PC"s in it, and take the whole thing with a grain of salt.