'Odd Arne Westad's daring ambition, supra-nationalist intellect, polyglot sources, masterly scholarship and trenchant analysis make The Cold War a book ofresounding importance for appraising our global future as well as understanding our past' Richard Davenport-Hines, TLS, Books of the Year As Germany and then Japan surrendered in 1945 there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the huge power of the USA and ...
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'Odd Arne Westad's daring ambition, supra-nationalist intellect, polyglot sources, masterly scholarship and trenchant analysis make The Cold War a book ofresounding importance for appraising our global future as well as understanding our past' Richard Davenport-Hines, TLS, Books of the Year As Germany and then Japan surrendered in 1945 there was a tremendous hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the huge power of the USA and USSR and the near-total collapse of most of their rivals created a unique, grim new environment: the Cold War. For over forty years the demands of the Cold War shaped the life of almost all of us. There was no part of the world where East and West did not, ultimately, demand a blind and absolute allegiance, and nowhere into which the West and East did not reach. Countries as remote from each other as Korea, Angola and Cuba were defined by their allegiances. Almost all civil wars became proxy conflicts for the superpowers. Europe was seemingly split in two indefinitely. Arne Westad's remarkable new book is the first to have the distance from these events and the ambition to create a convincing, powerful narrative of the Cold War. The book is genuinely global in its reach and captures the dramas and agonies of a period always overshadowed by the horror of nuclear war and which, for millions of people, was not 'cold' at all: a time of relentless violence, squandered opportunities and moral failure. This is a book of extraordinary scope and daring. It is conventional to see the first half of the 20th century as a nightmare and the second half as a reprieve. Westad shows that for much of the world the second half was by most measures even worse.
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This book does a great job of giving an overview of the Cold War and its effects throughout the entire world, from the US and Russia, to Europe, to South America and India. While the overall focus is chronological, the sections of the book are broken down to cover the specific geographical locations at that time, so there can be a bit of jumping back and forth on the short term timescale. (For example, one chapter might describe the situation in Russia from 1945 to 1954, then the next go over the history of Vietnam from 1920 to 1945.) This can be confusing at first, but in the end it allows each location to have a more cohesive timeline. While it doesn't go into excessive detail on any one country or event, it does a great job of describing the geopolitical interplay at work throughout this period of history.
While the author definitely has their own biases, they keep it tempered for the most part, and present the factual information. Overall, I think this is one of the best books on the Cold War because it does such a great job of giving the reader a view of the full picture. Highly recommended!
