102 books
—
4 voters
Cold War Books
Showing 1-50 of 11,271
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 287 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.52 — 91,164 ratings — published 2018
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3)
by (shelved 237 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.09 — 129,400 ratings — published 1963
The Cold War: A New History (Paperback)
by (shelved 221 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.95 — 8,539 ratings — published 2005
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Hardcover)
by (shelved 165 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.20 — 30,097 ratings — published 2014
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (George Smiley, #5; Karla Trilogy, #1)
by (shelved 162 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.06 — 107,135 ratings — published 1974
The Cold War: A World History (Hardcover)
by (shelved 147 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.31 — 2,493 ratings — published 2017
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (Hardcover)
by (shelved 142 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.23 — 16,207 ratings — published 2015
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 141 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.08 — 7,357 ratings — published 2012
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 128 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.25 — 4,534 ratings — published 2008
The Hunt for Red October (Jack Ryan, #3)
by (shelved 122 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.12 — 390,038 ratings — published 1984
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Paperback)
by (shelved 121 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.20 — 22,917 ratings — published 2003
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy (Hardcover)
by (shelved 111 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.15 — 5,609 ratings — published 2009
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Hardcover)
by (shelved 98 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.61 — 18,335 ratings — published 2020
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Hardcover)
by (shelved 95 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.27 — 14,738 ratings — published 2013
Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (Paperback)
by (shelved 90 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.24 — 11,463 ratings — published 1998
Call for the Dead (George Smiley, #1)
by (shelved 83 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.85 — 48,744 ratings — published 1961
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Paperback)
by (shelved 81 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.38 — 13,926 ratings — published 2005
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (Hardcover)
by (shelved 77 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.36 — 66,635 ratings — published 2019
Smiley's People (George Smiley, #7; Karla Trilogy, #3)
by (shelved 72 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.29 — 42,437 ratings — published 1979
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Paperback)
by (shelved 69 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.00 — 890 ratings — published 2005
The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 67 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.38 — 2,588 ratings — published 2022
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Hardcover)
by (shelved 66 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.96 — 15,602 ratings — published 2007
Red Storm Rising (Audio Cassette)
by (shelved 66 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.21 — 85,281 ratings — published 1986
Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy (Hardcover)
by (shelved 64 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.16 — 18,378 ratings — published 2020
Berlin 1961 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 64 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.12 — 1,911 ratings — published 2011
The Looking Glass War (George Smiley, #4)
by (shelved 63 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.73 — 18,988 ratings — published 1965
The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy, #2)
by (shelved 60 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.99 — 26,589 ratings — published 1977
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Paperback)
by (shelved 60 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.93 — 2,159 ratings — published 1985
The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Acts (Hardcover)
by (shelved 59 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.13 — 3,048 ratings — published 2020
The Secrets We Kept (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 59 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.65 — 79,357 ratings — published 2019
Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 59 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.84 — 4,336 ratings — published 2010
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Paperback)
by (shelved 56 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.08 — 9,026 ratings — published 1968
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 55 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.22 — 4,607 ratings — published 2023
Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall (ebook)
by (shelved 55 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.37 — 13,668 ratings — published 2016
The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 55 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.15 — 4,599 ratings — published 2013
Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3)
by (shelved 54 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.21 — 119,524 ratings — published 2014
Our Man in Havana (Paperback)
by (shelved 54 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.94 — 41,845 ratings — published 1958
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Paperback)
by (shelved 54 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.19 — 3,070 ratings — published 1995
The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 (Hardcover)
by (shelved 51 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.08 — 2,193 ratings — published 2006
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Paperback)
by (shelved 51 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.31 — 60,077 ratings — published 2005
A Night Divided (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 50 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.33 — 48,247 ratings — published 2015
The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 49 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.08 — 1,023 ratings — published 2018
The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 48 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.14 — 422 ratings — published 2018
Berlin Game (Bernard Samson, #1)
by (shelved 48 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.06 — 14,611 ratings — published 1983
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Hardcover)
by (shelved 46 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.15 — 10,459 ratings — published 2014
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman. From World War to Cold War (Hardcover)
by (shelved 46 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.14 — 1,190 ratings — published 2012
1983: The World at the Brink (Hardcover)
by (shelved 45 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.27 — 1,032 ratings — published 2018
The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 43 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.23 — 1,990 ratings — published 2014
Casino Royale (James Bond, #1)
by (shelved 43 times as cold-war)
avg rating 3.74 — 97,484 ratings — published 1953
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (Paperback)
by (shelved 43 times as cold-war)
avg rating 4.30 — 12,077 ratings — published 2003
“It was as if an intellectual Iron Curtain of highly sophisticated mendacity had been erected in anticipation of the fall of the actual Iron Curtain in order to forestall any prospect of a moral reckoning. With the idea of truth reduced to the status of a mere social construct--and thus dismissable as a malign
instrument of power-- history itself had been rendered absurd. Our culture was no longer in command of the moral intelligence that was needed to measure the
scale of human suffering and loss that had been incurred as a consequence of eighty years of totalitarian terror. We can only hope that the price to be paid for such a self-willed ignorance and complacency will not be as high in this century as it was in the last.”
―
instrument of power-- history itself had been rendered absurd. Our culture was no longer in command of the moral intelligence that was needed to measure the
scale of human suffering and loss that had been incurred as a consequence of eighty years of totalitarian terror. We can only hope that the price to be paid for such a self-willed ignorance and complacency will not be as high in this century as it was in the last.”
―
“Very few western Europeans or southeast Asians would have preferred to live in the type of Communist states that were created in eastern parts of their continental neighborhoods. And although the legacy of US interventions in Asia is usually roundly condemned, a majority of Europeans were and are convinced that the US military presence within their own borders helped keep the peace and develop democracies.
The very fact that the Cold War confrontation between the Superpowers ended peacefully was of course of supreme importance: With enough nuclear weapons in existence to destroy the world several times over, we all depended on moderation and wisdom to avoid an atomic Armageddon.”
― The Cold War: A World History
The very fact that the Cold War confrontation between the Superpowers ended peacefully was of course of supreme importance: With enough nuclear weapons in existence to destroy the world several times over, we all depended on moderation and wisdom to avoid an atomic Armageddon.”
― The Cold War: A World History












