 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | The "dean of Cold War historians" (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own. |
Average Customer Rating:   Mission Accomplished This book accomplishes the goal that it sets for itself. Gaddis sets out to write a concise history of the Cold War and manages to do it in 267 pages. The book is fascinating. While it doesn't get too deep into any details (hence the concise part) it covers the overall strategies and themes of the Cold War in sharp detail. One of the most interesting elements of the book is that he describes well the personalities that make things tick. In one of the final sections of the book he makes clear that the Cold War ends the way that it does because of the unique personalities that were influential at the time. The book does a very good job of conveying the sense of hope and wonder at the mostly peaceful dissolution of a conflict that some people thought would end the world. The book is clearly written and accessible, event to those whose historical knowledge of the period is mostly basic. Well done! Good introduction but biased and simplistic I bought this book because I was interested in a quick overview of the Cold War, from which I could choose other books to fill in the gaps on topics that I find interest me. In that respect, it is a decent book, and I have purchased two other books to continue learning ('The Making of a Counter Culture' by Theodore Roszak and 'Blacked Out' by Alasdair Roberts).
The problem with this book is that it has far too much of a 'good vs evil' theme. I would have liked to have seen more of a 'ideology vs ideology' or 'imperialist vs imperialist' theme, which would have helped go beyond simple caricatures of the two nations.
I was quite disappointed to see how much the book portrayed Gorbachev as an enlightened hero while only casually mentioning that he was quite hated in Russia. Also, there was almost no mention of Solzhenitsyn - how is that possible?
If you do decide to read this book, I suggest you supplement it with the following to help balance things out:
'Overthrow' by Stephen Kinzer
'The Two Souls of Socialism' by Hal Draper (available free online)
The US has undertaken many unethical and brutal endeavors over the past 100+ years. Also, there's strong elements of 'socialism' in nearly all industrialized nations, but without despotic regimes and popular oppression. The term 'socialism' is actually quite broad and has dramatically different meanings depending on which model you read - modern social democracy and democratic socialism have proven to provide a substantially better standard of living than what you'll find in the US. Reasonable Approach to a Difficult Project In the introduction, Gaddis sets the context for this book: the topic is not familiar to young people, and various students and others familiar with his scholarship wished for a much shorter, more easily digestible work on the entire subject of the Cold War.
Given this framework, the author arguably does a decent job. No-one could take on such an enormous topic and boil it down to so few pages without its resulting in a certain degree of superficiality and selectivity (to the point of excluding what many will believe is important information).
As someone who heard about these events when I was very young, Gaddis' approach results in a narrative that sounds very familiar and hence strikes me as fairly conventional. I personally disagreed with the author's assessment of some major figures, finding his appreciation of Ronald Reagan reminiscent of the characters in the film _Being There_, who thought they perceived genius in the strategic simplicity of someone who really *was*, well, simple. However, since one of the Amazon reader-reviewers I sampled found the book much too liberal and *politically correct,* obviously Gaddis did not take the most arch-conservative approach possible. If one of my children were getting his/her overview of the Cold War from this book, I would wish that the author offered a bit of commentary on the potentially negative outcomes (e.g., violent fundamentalist zealotry) that could arise from labeling one or another political system as biblically evil (instead of implying, as I think he does, that this was just a great PR strategy for the propagation of Democracy). However, it's easy to see how trying to be so inclusive could easily blow the book up to multi-volume size.
Would I personally pick other details to offer in such a short book on a long topic? Probably. However, Gaddis' book is a reasonably good survey and entry point for a person new to learning about the Cold War. A Well Considered History of the Cold War John Lewis Gaddis' book "The Cold War, A New History" accomplishes what it sets out to do very nicely- provide a general overview of the events, personalities, and issues at stake in the US-USSR confrontation. Gaddis expertly traces the evolution of relations between the two powers, their allies, and neutral nations during the period in which nuclear annihilation was an ever present fact of life.
One of the final chapters, which Lewis dubbed 'Actors' deals with those personalities who, whether intentionally or not, contributed to the Soviet Union's demise. These figures obviously include Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, but Gaddis provides wonderful insights into the roles of Pope John Paul II, Lech Wasa, Deng Xiaoping, and others whose actions helped to topple the "Dark and Evil Empire" of the USSR.
The virtue of this work, its brevity, is also its greatest weakness. Certain events are glossed over rather quickly leaving the reader not fully appreciating their effects upon the larger stage of the Cold War. Watergate, the Suez Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and even the Cuban Missile Crisis to name a few, simply don't get the time and consideration that they require for a truly thorough history. Gaddis uses just under 270 pages of text to tell an international history of over 45 years.
That said, if you are new to studying this era you will find a good overview here. Also, serious students will still be amazed at Gaddis' analysis of key points in the conflict, and his take on the Cold War as whole. I enjoyed and learned a lot from this book, I only wish it had been longer. Only partially successful I picked up "The Cold War: a New History" on my way to an airport and read it over several days and several flights. As I tend to do, immediately after purchasing it I put a privacy cover over the book such that I couldn't myself see the title or the author's name or his biography or other stuff printed on the cover. I figured it was more or less a standard historical potboiler and indeed to those expectations the book was marginally passable as something to pass the time. The story of Cold War as presented is overall competent but unnuanced. I'm too young to remember nearly all of the events presented in the book and am not particularly fascinated by cold war topics, but, frankly, I found very little historical material that wasn't general knowledge in the book.
The analysis presented is mundane and the writing at times is something that I'd expect from those historic but not particularly intellectual pocket books on tanks and battles. At one point, I was particularly annoyed with the writing of the book (how, exactly, does a supposed expert in the field who is trying to write a history justify the term 'Russian' in so many places where the term 'Soviet' is actually meant? How out of touch does one have to be to still be using the politically, linguistically, and historically incorrect term 'The Ukraine'?), thinking to myself wondering when the hack would stoop to quoting Clausewitz, only to find him doing so on the next page.
I was therefore shocked, shocked to later find that this was a book by a pre-eminent Yale historian. It made me feel like taking my Yale degrees off the wall.
To be fair, it seems that he wrote this book for first year undergraduates who need simple stories told to them, preferably without footnotes. However, to then foist this upon the general reading public as a 'history of the cold war' is disingenuous. I'm smarter than the level of discourse of this book, and I'm guessing you are too. If you want to read a comic book version of the cold war (complete with hyperbolized superhero characters) and are prepared to believe analytical points with the thinnest of evidence, then this book is for you. Otherwise, avoid. |  |
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