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The Cold War: A New History | 
 enlarge | Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $9.32
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Avg. Customer Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 7093
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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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 57 more reviews...
 OK, Fine August 15, 2008
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
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.
 A Scholarly Example of Cold War Biases June 5, 2008
John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War: A New History (2005) is an example of counter post-revisionism. The subtitle to Gaddis's work is misleading; stating his work is a new history carries an implication that there are new sources that change the interpretation of the Cold War. Gaddis restates traditionalist arguments in the wake of post-revisionism. Gaddis clearly reveals his bias in the preface, "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it." Central to Gaddis's argument is the perception Stalin wanted to dominate Europe. The domination of Europe would appease Stalin's need for self-security, which Gaddis argues was more important to Stalin than Marxism-Leninism. He argues Stalin's megalomania and determination to secure his own position placed the United States on the defensive, and created "Machiavellians" of U.S. political leaders, which undermined the democratic traditions and morality leading to operations such as the Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Gaddis justifies the actions of the U.S. by juxtaposing them with the overtly aggressive nature of the Soviet Union. The Cold War is a successor to traditionalists, and a counter to revisionists and post-revisionists who are apt to view the Cold War without the lens of early U.S. foreign policy, and more inclined to support their work with new archival material in Russian and English. Gaddis regurgitates Cold War biases that have been disproved by new sources in the former Soviet Union. Tony Judt best sums up Gaddis's treatment of the Cold War: "Gaddis's version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for 'a fireside fairytale with a happy ending'" (Reappraisals, 381).
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