David Halberstam Is Dead

Flipping back and forth between the Yankees-Devil Rays and Red Sox-Blue Jays tonight, I caught the tail end of an ESPN report on the death of Pulitzer Prize winning author David Halberstam, who was killed in an automobile accident in San Francisco on Monday. He was 73.

It's almost fitting that the news came while I was watching these two games: one of the first baseball books I remember reading as a kid was Summer of '49, Halberstam's classic retelling of the 1949 down-to-the-wire pennant race between the Sox and Yanks. A talented writer who seemed to enjoy creating a combination of the reality and legend of sports in his work, he followed '49 up with books on the 1964 pennant race, Michael Jordan, Ted Williams and his Red Sox teammates/lifelong friends and Bill Belichick. Altogether he wrote 21 books.