Perhaps better known to most readers for titles such as The Best and the Brightest (1972), The Powers That Be (1979), The Reckoning (1986), The Fifties (1993), and The Children (1998), David Halberstam is also recognized as one of the leading American sportswriters. Although he never covered sports routinely for newspapers or sports magazines, Halberstam has written or edited seven books and several articles and other pieces on major-league baseball, professional and collegiate basketball, amateur rowing, and fencing. Each of his sports books occupied several weeks on The New York Times best-sellers' list. Yet, despite Halberstam's achievements in sportswriting, the genre is not his principal vocation but rather provides him with a break from more serious projects. He completed The Amateurs (1985), a character study of four young men contesting to represent the United States in the 1984 Olympic Games in the single-sculls rowing event, while researching and writing The Reckoning, an examination of American...