Halberstam's final book is a gripping epic of the Korean War

The often disregarded Korean War seems an unlikely subject for an epic book of the sort the late David Halberstam became famous for.

When President Harry Truman sent U.S. forces to the Korean peninsula in 1950, he termed it a "police action" by United Nations troops. Chinese leader Mao Zedong called his soldiers "volunteers." After three years of fighting, the conflict ended in 1953 in stalemate with the U.S.-backed South Korea and communist North Korea divided near the 38th parallel. In the half century since it ended, the Korean conflict has inspired far fewer books and movies than World War II or the Vietnam War.

Leave it to Halberstam to show us, in "The Coldest Winter," that this was a war of dire consequence in an extraordinary moment in history. It was also his final book. He made the last edits just days before he died in a car accident in April. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote 21 books in all, including tomes on American failure in Vietnam ("The Best and the Brightest") and dynasties in the modern media ("The Powers That Be").

"The Coldest Winter" is epic in both scale and drama. The main characters are as well known as any in history: Stalin, Mao, MacArthur and Truman. Just five years after the decisive Allied victory in World War II, the world was newly unstable. Mao and the communists had assumed power in China. The Soviet Union had just tested its first atomic bomb.

Halberstam's recounting of the immense shifts in battlefield momentum is breathtaking. When North Korea crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950, its well-trained army easily overwhelmed South Korean forces. The once-mighty U.S. Army (under U.N. auspices) fared little better, suffering a series of humiliating defeats. Over the next six months, American-led forces turned the tide and pushed north, only to face the onslaught of 300,000 Chinese soldiers in one of the biggest ambushes in U.S. military history. In January 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgway led a brilliantly conceived counterattack.

The American losses involved monumental miscalculations and "a very dangerous kind of euphoria" — Gen. Douglas MacArthur had previously guaranteed that U.S. troops would be home by Christmas 1950. MacArthur, the commander of U.N. forces, wanted to push north into China, but Truman and his advisers feared a widening conflict, one possibly involving the Soviets and atomic weapons.

There may be no more compelling figure in American history than MacArthur. In 1950, the aging five-star general was still wildly popular for his heroics in World War II and his postwar leadership in Japan. Halberstam nails the immensity of MacArthur's triumphs and follies. In his Tokyo command center, the general surrounded himself with sycophants and regularly defied Truman, his commander in chief.

At the heart of this book are the soldiers in the field. Halberstam supplies can't-put-down accounts of the heroics and, occasionally, cowardice of soldiers in ferocious combat. In one gripping moment near Pusan, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, leader of the U.S. Eighth Army, leaned out the open door of a low-flying plane, shouting frantically through a bullhorn at retreating American soldiers, " 'Stop! Go back, you yellow sons of bitches! You are not under attack! Go back; you had great positions!' The troops paid no attention, leaving Walker in a rage."

In recent years, Halberstam was highly critical of the current war in Iraq (in Vanity Fair and elsewhere) but, to his credit, he waits nearly 400 pages in this book to thoroughly describe how MacArthur and his staff mishandled prewar intelligence, and to fault the Bush administration for similar mistakes in Iraq.

The writing is not seamless; the narrative is nonlinear, sometimes darting back and forth in time, and can leave the reader disoriented. Some critics have scorned (and parodied) Halberstam's reliance on personal profile, but for me, this is part of his enduring appeal. He is a peerless reporter of events and facts — with a signature human touch.

In an ending "Author's Note," made more poignant because of his recent death, Halberstam reflects on why he likes to write: "One of the great pleasures of what I do comes from the constant sense of surprise of the reporting — how many people turn out during the interviews to give more than you expected and thus enhance the entire experience. That forms something I particularly prize in what has been a very long journalistic career: a respect for the nobility of ordinary people."

What a fitting tribute to those people — and a parting gift to the rest of us — is this, his magisterial, last book.

David Takami is the author of "Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle."