Fall of the Berlin Wall [Paperback]

William F Buckley (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: WILEY JOHN (March 30, 2004)
• ASIN: B000K2SO74
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The denouement of the Cold War..., May 7, 2004

By 

Thomas Moody - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fall of the Berlin Wall (Hardcover)

Before reading this surprisingly succinct work by William F.Buckley, it would have been hard for me to imagine a comprehensive Cold War history consolidated into 192 pages of text. But under the amazingly capable pen of Buckley, the reader learns all the highlights (lowlights?) of this seminal period in International history.

Starting with the Four-Power agreement in post WWII Germany, we see the numerous policy offenses initiated by the USSR as they grasp for power by forming the Eastern Bloc of socialist countries. Nowhere is this skewed outlook more evident than in war-torn and politically seperated Germany...specifically, it's capital in Berlin. We see immediately, the subversion encountered by the citizens of East Berlin and their realization that life would be best lived outside this repressive regime. The outpouring of the population to the West is, of course, the reason that the Wall is erected...thus symbolically subjugating Eastern Europe to over 30 years of repressive treatment. Communist/Socialist leaders from Walter Ulbricht to Erich Honecker are analyzed and dismissed as their policies reflect the repressive attitude that Communism endows on it's subjects...while at the same time it's leaders live in comparative luxury. Buckley provides these insights with a wit and writing style that makes it easy to understand this subversion and frustration that all in the East must have felt during this period. Documenting the many attrocities enacted by the East Germans as the Wall is erected and further enhanced throughout the 60's, Buckley takes the reader along for the many inside dealings that the East tried to legitimize and enhance it's regime on the International stage.

Major Cold War events such as the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the "Prague Spring" in 1968 are connected with Buckley's wry commentary that also ties in the human component to these major events. We see American General Lucious Clay stare down the Soviets at Checkpoint Charlie and see how this strength of character was unfortunately a rareity in American policy towards the Soviet Union...rare until that confleunce of major Cold War revisionists Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev enacted several initiatives that ultimately lead not only to the destruction of the Wall, but the end of Communism and, more specifically, the Soviet Union itself. Buckley covers all this in an amazingly comprehensive manner and closes out the book with the enacting of the Democratic government that exists in a unified Germany today.

If a short, to-the-point comprehensive history of the Cold War and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall is what you're looking for, than this is the book for you. Beautifully written and covering all the major seminal periods of the Cold War, Buckley enhances his reputation as a political writer and serves the public well with "The Fall of the Berling Wall". This is a work that I'd recommend highly.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Fall of the Berlin Wall, March 17, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Fall of the Berlin Wall (Hardcover)

This book is really fascinating. William F. Buckley Jr. writes with amazing detail about the symbolism of the Berlin Wall, both its rise and ultimately, the meaning of its fall. I really found the personal stories included, of people trying to escape to West Germany, to be so powerful. Anybody who is interested in the Cold War history should read this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cold War's Story, Concisely Told, September 25, 2005

By 

Gary C. Marfin (Sugar Land, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fall of the Berlin Wall (Hardcover)

We are extremely fortunate to have the story of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall rendered in the precise narrative of Mr. Buckley's book. Sceptics who might have expected Mr. Buckley exclusively to lavish praise on President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher will be sorely disappointed. What emerges in this concise history is far more complex. Three factors combined over time "to tear down this wall." First, Reagan and Thatcher were remarkably adept at pressuring the Soviet Union. On the U.S. side, National Security Directive - 75 sanctioned efforts to stimulate internal pressures on the USSR. The Star Wars program became a threat that Gorbachev could neither ignore nor afford to confront. Second, Gorbachev himself made the right moral choice in choosing to recognize rather than repress the growing aspirations for democracy in the Soviet bloc. [There was nothing inevitable in that, as made clear in the Gorbachev chapter in Ferguson's Virtual History.] Finally, within the Soviet Union, perhaps most especially in Gdansk, the desire for autonomy was courageously made actionable by ordinary citizens who at that perfect moment in time decided to become some of the century's greatest heroes. All these factors combined to replace the cold, unwavering Brezhnev Doctrine -- once a Soviet state always a Soviet state -- with what Primakov later implied was the new, Sinatra doctrine -- they can do it their way. Inevitably, the problem with well-written short books is that one wishes they were longer. So, I would like to have seen Mr. Buckley delve more into the Soviet struggle in Afghanistan with the ensuing alleged consequences for Al Queada, and I think the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict deserved a more in-depth narrative, one placing it in its larger historical context. All that is little more than saying I wish Buckely had continued to write this book, and that, I think, is often the way good short books books become really long insipid books. Thankfully, Buckley opted to give us a superbly readable and precisely rendered account of a significant part of what was both, as historian John Gaddis called it, the "long peace," and at the same time the long war of the 20th Century.