Customer Reviews

The Cold War: A History

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Instead, I highly recommend the masterpiece book on the Cold War called The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis or The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown. Yale professor Gaddis has been a renowned scholar of the Cold War for decades, and Oxford scholar Brown has been a renowned and award-winning scholar of the Cold War for a long time. In contrast, I do not recommend this book by Martin Walker, who is mainly a newspaper journalist. You can do better.

I read the first seventy pages of this book by Walker and stopped reading it because I thought that the author simply did not "get it right." For starters, the book oddly begins at the end of World War II, when the seeds of the Cold War actually started during World War II, and even before that. USA and USSR emerged from WWII as superpower rivals, distrustful of each other. The author has a poor understanding of Franklin Roosevelt's strategy towards the end of the war, does not explain Stalin's aspirations, and misunderstands the Truman administration's strategy to deal with Stalin, I believe. I also believe that Walker is far too forgiving of authoritarian communism and the ability to deliver on the false promises it did not.

Walker's book is also dated. New information has been released since this book was written quite awhile ago. To his credit, Walker is a good writer and has a good grasp of most of the history of the Cold War, but there are better, more recent books about the Cold War.

I also recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick.

Walker's depth of knowledge is on display here - it is impressive to say the least. For a reader who is not familiar with the key political players and events of the Cold War, this in-depth look at the Cold War is intimidating at first. However, Walker does a commendable job of stating his argument early on and supporting it with both primary and secondary sources (even if one has qualms with his "no one's fault" argument). The argument is logically traced from Yalta to the fall of communism and makes for an altogether enjoyable read.

There are four really impressive features about this book. First, it is so evidently fair-minded, trying to look at the history of the planet from 1945-1990 from the point of view of Russians, Americans, Europeans and the developing countries alike. Second, it is phenomenally well-researched, taking us from the private letters between JFK and European leaders like prime minister Macmillan or between Reagan and Gorbachev to the secret Politburo discussions on the invasion of Afghanistan. Third, it blends together the economic as well as the politico-military history of the era, and keeps reminding us that while the Soviets throught they were fighting an ideological war, the West knew that is was fundamentally an economic struggle, and that in the end the money would win. Finally, this author writes like a dream, clearly and yet movingly, mixing anecdote and deep historical perspective. I bought this book because the New York Times review called it is the best single volume history of the Cold War, and they were absolutely right. Having read this, I also bought the same author's 'America Reborn', which is even more brilliant.

This book is a good overview of the cold war, and covers the major events, often drawing on hard-to-find sources.

It's also pretty balanced, not conservative, and not terribly liberal. I almost stopped reading when Walker drew a weak parallel between the resistance to racial integration in the American South to the Soviet massacre of 3,000 innocent Hungarians in 1956, but this was the only abomination before the last chapter of the book, so I continued. (HOW can a person compare American police using riot-tactics to Soviet tank crews mopping Hungarian-puree off their tank treads?)

However, in the final chapter, Walker unfairly criticizes America as having won the Cold War, but having more in common with the USSR than her European allies. For example, Walker dared to compare the 100-some executions of convicted criminals in America to the millions of innocents and dissidents murdered by Communist repression.

So, up to the last chapter, this is an excellent book, but it tapers off dramatically.

Before I describe this book, the following needs to be said: This is not a military or Soviet history of the cold war.

That being said, this book is a fine economic and diplomatic history of the Cold War, from an Anglo-American perspective. Whild that may sound like a narrowly-focused book, it really is not, as the author uses well-placed juxtpositions and anecdotes that track the shifting attitudes of NATO Countries and the Soviet Union throughout the war. Particularly interesting is the analysis of each side's economy and the US-USSR tendency to try to bluff each other out.

Reading this book requires sketchy knowledge of the military history of the war.

While there are certainly newer and better general-histories, the unique angle of this book, combined with its bargain price due to age, makes it a great and enlightening read.

The Cold War: A History contains a lot of history to get through. In 357 pages, it covers world history as driven by the Cold War from its beginnings in the 1940's all the way up and including the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. All the usual suspects are included: Stalin, Khrushchev, Truman, Chiang Kai-shek, Eisenhower and Kennedy, just to name a few. Of course, other players are sprinkled throughout the text.

The Cold war was called "cold" because traditional fighting techniques such as bombings. Air raids and ground troops weren't used. Instead, the Cold War was waged with deceit, assassinations, selective economic pressures and third party military encounters - which is just another way of saying that you got other people to fight your battles for you.

I found the book exceedingly interesting and eye-popping, especially to the extent that the Cold War drove world history for so many decades. We're talking almost fifty years. Korea, Vietnam, the wars of Africa, the Suez Canal. Israel, the mid-East and Desert Storm, Sputnik and the race for the Moon were either directly or indirectly brought about by the Cold War. Imagine everything hat spun off from those events. It's staggering. Like millions of other people, I grew up and spent the major part of my life during the Cold War, so to some degree, the Cold War made us who we are today.

I recommend this book to anybody interested in the history of civilization

Walker's book is very complete. He doesn't spend as much time on every event of the cold war, but he omits none.

Walker is also very objective. Probably because he doesn't discuss in gruesome detail the bloodbaths of the Hungarian uprising and the crushing of the Prague Spring, he also refrains from emphasizing the horrors resulting from US policy in Taiwan, Guatemala, Grenada, and many other countries in the third world (for that you need to read the not-so-objective "Killing Hope" by William Blum).

Much of the focus of the book is on the relation between the US, the Soviets, and the Western Europeans, with the main events that took place in the third world included but not analyzed as deeply. He also focusses on the mutual influences between the cold war and world economy and finance, particularly near the end of the book.

I found at times that the writing could have been less convoluted and more to the point, but the book as a whole reads well. For Cold War histories, I still prefer Walter Lafeber's book. But Walker did a good job of discussing what Lafeber only superficially touched in his book. So the two books complement each other very well.

While there are many books on the Cold war this one has to be the best. It is the only book I have read that uses voluminous research from not only the American side but the Russian side as well. If you are looking for that fair and balanced viewpoint than this is the place to start. Walker writes very well and covers the relevant aspects of the war including détente. It focuses mostly on the power that the two exhibit and sticks with diplomatic history. There is some discussion of third world (with the exception of Cuba, Vietnam and Egypt) otherwise it really focuses on Europe. Nonetheless it deserves its five stars and is the only book I ever recommend when someone wants to read about the cold war.

The writer supplied an immense amount of detail revolving around the political aspects of the cold war. Don't read this if you are looking for a military book. I thought the writer did a great job at reporting facts and leaving his bias to a minimum.

I took an International Baccalaureate (IB) History course my senior year (along with all other IB subjects) and this was, for all intents and purposes, our textbook for the majority of the year. It was an incredible resource that helped me and my peers get an fresh look at this time period and the heavy use of political subtlety that took place. We realized why it was actually a "war" (it moved us away from the fifth grade formula of 'it was a fight between capitalism and communism that didn't use guns so that's why it was cold') and developed our skills in analyzing the author's viewpoints. If there are any teachers of gifted/accelerated history courses out there, this is your choice for great Cold War material that can be appreciated by 17/18 year olds.