This book should be viewed against the background of the general state of socials sciences.
Acquisition of new knowledge may be divided into two parts: producing new findings, and checking their reliability. Both are equally important, but the academic system skewed in favor of the former, and against the latter. This leads to the replication crisis plaguing biomedical sciences and psychology. Researchers in industry, who try to use the results of published research, discover that that these results cannot be replicated, that is, are wrong. Some experts maintain that up to half of all published results are wrong, but continue in circulation, being cited and relied upon by other researchers.
If this is how things are in experimental sciences, how much worse they must be in the social sciences where one cannot experiment, and the scientific golden standard of replication is simply inapplicable. There, hasty, one-sided accounts based on misunderstanding, authors' prejudices, or state propaganda, once established and cited multiple times, become part of what "everybody knows" and are extremely difficult to dislodge. Those who were taught the established version, who cited it and based their reasoning on its acceptance, become its partisans and often unquestioning defenders. Finding faults with long-established results acquires a socially unpleasant side. As a result, there is too little critical examination of what we think we know, and too much reliance on the findings that have never been checked for reliability.
This book is exciting in large part because it takes on a long-established account of the wars of 1967-1973, events that generated enormous literature. It marshals many different pieces of evidence, some found in the unexpected places. With the Soviet archives inaccessible, too many authors neglect the Soviet side or repeat poorly digested Soviet propaganda. Not this book. Creativity and imagination in looking for evidence is another distinguishing feature of the book.
read and judge for yourself.
Vladimir Kontorovich
Professor of Economics
Haverford College
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