David Halberstam Dies

Pulitzer prize-winning author David Halberstam died in a car accident Monday in Menlo Park, California. A prolific writer on politics and sports, Halberstam was also an avid fly fisher. Steve Sheppard writes about his work in the Nantucket Independent: “He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War. Although his later books ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ ‘The Powers That Be’ and ‘War in a Time of Peace’ earned him renown as an author of politics and political themes, he had forged a second identity as a top sportswriter, with breakthrough books like ‘The Breaks of the Game,’ ‘The Amateurs,’ ‘October 1964’ and his most recent book, ‘The Education of Coach,’ about fellow islander and New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick.”
We recently uncovered an entertaining story Halberstam wrote about finding himself unable to watch the his beloved Giants play the Ravens in the Superbowl because of a previously scheduled trip to the Rio Grande. “So it was that we picked up and left one of the greatest trout streams in the world, the action clearly still hot, and driven by our guide Jorge Castro (gracious enough neither to say anything nor to show any obvious disbelief), raced for downtown Rio Grande.” On ESPN.com.