The Cold War: A New History | 
 enlarge | Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 31023
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0143038273
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.825
EAN: 9780143038276
ASIN: 0143038273
Publication Date: December 26, 2006
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Product Description
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 whyfrom 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 58 more reviews...
 An excellent manual on the cold war October 7, 2008
I want to recommend this book to any person interested in the cold war. In less than 300 pages the author gives a general overview of the events that took place from the end of the WW2 until the golpe that Eltsin made fail in the ex Urss on 1991. It summarizes many facts in a few pages and makes clear who were the main actors that contributed to feed and ultimately to end the cold war. There are also some comments from the author that help define the importance of the values and of the personalities and above all the reasons why cold war was born and finally ended. I HIGHLY recommend this book
 OK, Fine August 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
OK, Fine. I later find this product cheaper IN Denmark.
Everything else went fine and smoothly...
Well researched but offers nothing new August 5, 2008
Gaddis offers a concise, readable, and well-documented history of the Cold War. What he does not offer us is a "new" history, as the title promises. This book helped fill in some blanks about the most dangerous period of our history, but I didn't set the book down thinking I had a strongly different view on the event then I could have got from other sources.
I liked how the book allowed you to get in the heads of the various U.S. presidents, and see how they thought about the war--sometimes counterintuitively. However, it seemed like there were things left out. Cambodia is mentioned only in passing on the last page, even though communism hit that country harder than any other, arguably.
The book does seem titled to the idea that the U.S. was the morally superior of the two sides, though Gaddis does not shy away from the darker moments of U.S. geopolitics in the Cold War.
Oddly enough, I walked away hoping that there would be more, not less, retrospective analysis. Just how close was the Soviet Union to collapsing before Reagan took office? Just what might have happened if the United States had not "faught" the Cold War and let the Soviet Union expand and collapse on its own? Normally, scholars tend to get too far out on hypotheticals, but here I find myself wishing he would have spent a little more time on them.
Great condition, good buy for the money July 16, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was impressed with the shipping time.
The book was in great condition.
All positive feedback at this point.
Fantastic -- great for generalists and cold war buffs July 10, 2008
Very tighly written book that still manages to produce some fascinating annecdotes (Kruschev and Mao in the pool together) to enliven the narrative. Both myself (a history buff) and my wife (decidedly not a history buff) found it a comprehensive and yet very readiable survey of the Cold War. Its both informative and entertaining. I strongly recommend it.
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