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Dec 16, 2009

Matt rated it:

If you asked the 10 best historians in the world to write a history of the Cold War in under 250 pages, you would get back 10 works that were overly broad, sweeping, slanted, and/or missing key facts. Gaddis hasn't avoided all these pitfalls, but it's an excellent effort, and most important for his target audience, the book is eminently readable. He creates a sense of urgency and page-turning suspense in a book that describes the history of a war that never actually got "hot." His poli More...

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Jun 21, 2011

Elliot rated it:

The eminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis was at my alma mater, Ohio University, before moving to Yale. His editor suggested he distill his vast knowledge into this accessible intro. This is old-school history: documents, big leaders and events--all sprinkled with an almost invisible coating of analysis, speculation and ideology. It seems that the Great Powers knew they’d never use their weapons, and made awkward attempts to maintain the status quo, like a Romantic Comedy where small bit More...

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Dec 30, 2010

Susan rated it:

I listened to this one and I think I need to listen to it twice. I found it extremely engaging, but it's not your typical "narrative" history. He organizes his materials more or less chronologically, but focuses on idea and concepts and people more than chronology. Most fascinating was the chapter called "Actors" which he means both literally and figuratively, i.e., the world personalities involved whom he saw as capable actors on the world stage, with a clearly articulated a More...

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Dec 05, 2010

Jim rated it:

The memories of The Falklands and Thatcher brought about by Vulcan inspired me to pick up this treatise at Heathrow Airport on the Cold War, and I was glad I did. Where the Vulcan 607 was all Bulldog Drummond, this historical overview was viewed firmly from Uncle Sam's spectacles, where world events revolve around American foreign policy, almost exclusively. It seems that every world event happened because of what the Americans did, or did not, do. So even Gorbachev pulled down the Soviet Union More...

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Mar 09, 2009

Jeffrey rated it:

The target audience of this book is the generation younger than me that has the Cold War as a historical event rather than part of their lives. As that, it is fairly well written, targeted well, and concise. Perhaps a bit too concise. The whole premise of the book comes off feeling as if decades passed without anything happening, then Ronald Reagan, the great professional actor comes and saves the day. The author clearly admires that particular president, and his usually restrained prose wax More...

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Jul 27, 2011

John rated it:

This is a really good analysis of the events that led up to the Cold War; an explanation of the pressures that built up during the 1950s and 60s; the brinkmanship; some of the political tensions that existed within the Communist sphere of influence - in particular the distrust/dislike that existed between China and the USSR - ;and, importantly, the events that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It explains, in layman's terms, the significance of the roles pl More...

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Nov 02, 2009

Thomas rated it:

First of all, the title. The only thing that makes this "a new history" is the fact that it's newer than the author's other books on the subject. "A Brief History of the Cold War" would have better conveyed the nature of the book, but it sounded as if it should have been written by Stephen Hawking, so they went for the colon instead.

Gaddis has assembled a solid, straightforward account of the Cold War. The reader is very professional, so the audio version is very More...

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Nov 17, 2009

Magda rated it:

By the end of 1930, his agents had arrested or killed some 63,000 opponents of collectivization. By 1932, they had deported over 1.2 million “kulaks”—Stalin’s term for “wealthy” peasants—to remote regions within the U.S.S.R. By 1934 at least 5 million Ukrainians had starved to death from resulting famine. Stalin then began purging government and party officials, producing the imprisonment of another 3.6 million people and the execution, in just 1937–38, of almost 700,000. They included many of L More...

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Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine added it

Gaddis, professor of history at Yale and the Cold War's preeminent historian, delivers a concise, readable introduction to an era about which Americans have increasingly little recollection. The author has had the somewhat unusual opportunity to examine his period of expertise both from within__in his books Strategies of Containment (1982) and The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987), for instance__and now, with the benefit of new archival documents and hindsight, as a s

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Nov 12, 2009

Rayrumtum rated it:

This was a good if frustrating read. If written for the young people who didn't experience the Cold War, the less than 300 pages devoted to the topic did not give them much of a flavor of what happened or the atmospherics of the period. For example, the Cuban Missile Crisis is dispatched in two pages, less than the space given to the Watergate scandal. Those who lived through this era are going to find the treatment of some topics much too superficial. Covering a 50-year war in less than 30 More...

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Oct 13, 2009

Timothy rated it:

I had just finished reading both "The First World War" and the "Second World War" by John Keegan, and wanted to dig deeper into the consequences and the aftermath of those conflicts. "The Cold War," by John Lewis Gaddis, was recommended to me, so I dove right in.

I really enjoyed this read because it included just the right balance of readability and information. Gaddis sprinkles in little anecdotes such as Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev awkwardly meet More...

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Dec 04, 2010

Lazarus rated it:

Disappointingly Gaddis finds fault not with the substance of US covert activities - the propping up of repressive right-wing dictatorships, the undermining of democratically elected foreign governments and the like - but for getting caught: "Where Nixon went wrong," for example, "was not in his use of secrecy to conduct foreign policy - diplomacy had always required that - but in failing to distinguish between actions he could have justified if exposed and those he could never hav More...

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Oct 27, 2010

Greg rated it:

The Cold War frames the vast majority of the 20th Century and as of yet I had not read a book dedicated to its history. It's had a lot of impact on some of my recent reads such as Nixonland, The Legacy of Ashes, and Charlie Wilson's War.

I was hoping for something a bit juicier, but this is a very shallow overview of the Cold War that would suffice for a sophomore high school level class. There wasn't really any analysis. John Lewis Gaddis provided the basic facts and some conclusions, More...

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May 24, 2010

Milan rated it:

Liked this book a lot. Contrary to the usual custom, it is not written chronologically, but each chapter focuses on a specific event or events which shaped the world during second half of 20th century. It is easy to read and the authors reveals has some intriguing details about major events in the cold war history.

I also found it interesting to read how the one situation was perceived differently by the western democracies and eastern-bloc autocracies. In the epilogue, the author pro More...

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Nov 17, 2009

Jon rated it:

The Cold War: A New History is among the latest entries by John Lewis Gaddis on the history and politics of the Cold War. Though it reviews a time still within the living memory of many, Gaddis frets that younger generations have grown up without an understanding or an appreciation for the important lessons of the Cold War. This he thinks a shame, perhaps even a danger. So to provide a remedy and cure the ailment of historical ignorance, Gaddis proposes to write a history—a new history—that will More...

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Jul 27, 2011

Darran rated it:

I thought this was ok. It's pacy and readable, but perhaps he's playing to the gallery too much. It's really simplified and very obviously written for the general reader. His biases are fairly obvious. He devotes a lot of space to the era's and achievments of Nixon and Reagan, and not much to Kennedy and Carter, and he portrays all the Soviet leaders as thick, cruel and hateful until Gorbachev. I read this not long after Postwar by Tony Judt, which is a vastly superior book that covers much of t More...

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Dec 02, 2008

Jon rated it:

Although very few post-WWII histories will ever match up to Gaddis's own Strategies of Containment, this book is perhaps the single best summary of the trajectory of the Cold War as a whole. While it does make use of recently-opened Soviet-bloc archives, the book's main strength is simply its powerful writing, coherent survey of the era's main historical threads, and lively descriptions of many of the individual relationships that defined and altered the course of events. Highly recommended as a More...

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Dec 01, 2010

William rated it:

The Cold War was a Gordian knot of interacting conflicts that was hard to explain while it was happening, and hard to summarize once it ended suddenly. Forty-five years of brinksmanship and stalemate punctuated a struggle that never quite became World War III. John Lewis Gaddis deftly unties this confusing bundle of interaction in just 266 pages of text, making "The Cold War--A New History" the ideal starter book on this period of history.

Gaddis organizes his book into a seri More...

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Apr 30, 2008

Scott rated it:

Good intro in the half a century long struggle known as the cold war. Author does good job of trying to examine all the reasons for the start of the struggle, which it's roots can be traced to the early 20th century and became a profound and identifiable struggle between two emerging superpowers, even before the defeat of the Nazis in WWII. The author introduces us to important events in the struggle, such as the Hungarian and Chezch revolts, the Cuban missle crisis, the Korean, Vietnam and 6 da More...

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Sep 19, 2011

Jason rated it:

Gaddis has done an excellent job of telling an extremely complicated history in a tight and well-written volume. The importance of his story is contrasted by his reminding the reader that his college students today have almost no living memory of the Cold War or just how serious a historical epic it was between two great powers.

As the world has changed dramatically over the past 16 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, this book will be an excellent resource to remember just wha More...

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Dec 18, 2008

Sarah rated it:

Gaddis explains in his preface that he set out to write this book for his students, utilizing their feedback that the books they use in his classes have too many dates (among other things). He then wrote this book as a history of the Cold War, but focusing more on events and their impact upon subsequent events, rather than writing a chronological narrative. The result is a book that is engaging, interesting, and rarely feels like a "history book". Gaddis draws correlations between the More...

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Jul 19, 2011

Jill rated it:

The Cold War: A New History provides an excellent example of the ideological biases of a historian creating a skewed misrepresentation of the facts about an era in order to conform with biased perceptions. This so-called “new history” is full of sweeping generalizations, unwarranted conclusions, and dubious assertions that scream out bias at every turn. In conclusion, beware of books claiming to be history books! This one doesn’t meet the most basic criteria of objective reporting of the fact More...

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Jan 27, 2012

Sandy rated it:

Gaddis is accurately called the leading Cold War historian and this book demonstrates the depth and breadth of his knowledge. Gaddis is extremely successful in his attempt to turn 4-plus decades of Cold War history spanning the political, economic, military, technological spheres and manages to elegantly tell the story of the era in a way that makes it very accessible for readers, like myself, who are too young to remember much of (or in my case, any of - the Berlin Wall fell when I was 2 months More...

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May 28, 2009

Hollis rated it:

When you read books on the Cold War they are almost always over 300 pages long, usually quite confusing and often go off on scholarly digressions which strand the reader. The good thing about about this book (one of the latest from the Cold War Man) is that it summarises the whole period within a philosophical framework and presents in a way that is clear and easy-to-read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Cold War history.

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Feb 07, 2008

Carole rated it:

The title of this book is boring enough that I'm afraid no one will believe me that I totally enjoyed every page.

This is a really good, readable book. Way more of a page-turner than most history books I've read. I really enjoyed reading it. This guy wrote it because he realized that a lot of us 20-somethings don't know much about the Cold War because we weren't really reading newspapers when we were 7 years old. So he's writing for an educated but uninformed audience.

The More...

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Aug 01, 2011

Zach rated it:

Gaddis has written a highly entertaining, highly brief survey of the major events of The Cold War. Despite its shortcomings in going into any major detail about any single major events, the book succeeds in what Gaddis intends to accomplish: write a brief overview of The Cold War. He does delve into an analysis of certain events and introduces the reader to the major questions that many other historians have asked in much more detail.

This book will work exactly as it is intended an More...

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Aug 10, 2009

leighcia rated it:

An excellent, well-written and balanced book about the cold war. Gaddis manages to be honest about America’s numerous failures and shortcomings without idealizing other countries or cultures. Gaddis also ties chapters together with thematic interpretations rather than chronological ordering. I found this book enjoyable to read and informative for someone who usually finds history books boring.

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Jan 29, 2009

Laura rated it:

I was born in 1983 and missed a lot of the cold war action. Even though it is "current" history, I have never known much about it. This book, although certainly written from an American historian perspective, was a very informative book that was interesting to read. A great starting place for developing your knowledge and understanding of the events that made up the cold war.

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Feb 09, 2012

Susan rated it:

This book accomplishes exactly what it sets out to in the author's introduction: provide a brief overview of Cold War history and intricacies for those of us (myself included) for whom that time period is nothing but the faintest memory of our early childhood. It was an easy, enjoyable read without glossing over the horrors and guilts on both sides.

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Nov 08, 2009

Kim rated it:

I really didn't think I would enjoy this book or be interested in the 'cold war' but I was fascinated. This is the first cold war perspective I have read but this book was coherent, engaging, and not overly long. I would strongly recommend it for those looking for a general overview and a jumping off point to more investigation.

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