The Next Century by David Halberstam

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through Book Bub (an online reading service I subscribe to) and I came upon The Next Century by David Halberstam.  I wanted to read this book  because David Halberstam was a great reporter (he died in 2007) and was best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.  But what interested me the most is that The Next Century was a book about what the world and the US would look like in the 21st century and he wrote the book in 1991. 

Imagine trying to contemplate what 2022 would look like from the vantage point of 1991?  Halberstam had too much experience of course covering wars and revolutions to make such firm predictions.  Instead in The Next Century he lays out where the world and the US has been since World War II, where we were in 1991 and his concerns for the future.

But what I came to realize as I finished The New Century is that any sort of speculation from 1991 about where we are now was going to miss so many key events that no one saw coming.  Halberstam's book for example begins with Gorbachev, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lech Walesa and the trade union movement Solidarity.  It seems like a long time ago.  He also writes a good deal about Japan.  Back in the 1980's Japan and how they were possibly moving ahead of the US in auto production, electronics etc was seen as a big challenge.  No one worries about that now. 

But did David Halberstam spot back in 1991 things about America that we should have been more concerned about?  He does write:  

"What started in the early fifties as a sense of possibilities gradually became expectations and then finally entitlements.  Those who have memories of a poorer pre-World War II America, one touched by the Depression, where people (and the nation) had to make choices about spending, are older and increasingly a minority ... Now we have the current generation which believes that living in the present and paying in the future is the best revenge ... How quickly it all goes when it's built on sand ... and Donald Trump's empire is in the hands of banks (the key to the Trump success, while it lasted, is that New York City was in such bad shape that it gave him a 160 million tax benefit for his glitzy projects).  The result, of course, was not greater productivity but greater wealth for the already wealthy".  

Halberstam did a decent job in The Next Century trying to see into the future but it turned out to be an impossible task.  Even in 2019 who could have predicted Covid? And so I can't recommend The New Century.  Instead you might want to go with David Halberstam's other books, his critically acclaimed bestseller The Best and the Brightest about the Kennedy Administration and The Children about the Civil Rights Movement.  Both books I believe will have a great deal to say about today's times.