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A New History
Penguin
December 2005
352 pages
ISBN: 1594200629
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Historical
In 1950, when Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kim
Il-Sung met in Moscow to discuss the future, they had reason
to feel optimistic. International communism seemed
everywhere on the offensive: Stalin was at the height of his
power; all of Eastern Europe was securely in the Soviet
camp; America's monopoly on nuclear weapons was a thing of
the past; and Mao's forces had assumed control over the
world's most populous country. Everywhere on the globe,
colonialism left the West morally compromised. The story of
the previous five decades, which saw severe economic
depression, two world wars, a nearly successful attempt to
wipe out the Jews, and the invention of weapons capable of
wiping out everyone, was one of worst fears confirmed, and
there seemed as of 1950 little sign, at least to the West,
that the next fifty years would be any less dark. In fact, of course, the century's end brought the widespread
triumph of political and economic freedom over its
ideological enemies. How did this happen? How did fear
become hope? In The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis makes a
major contribution to our understanding of this epochal
story. Beginning with World War II and ending with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, he provides a thrilling
account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, rich
with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and
much fresh insight into its most crucial events. The first
significant distillation of cold war scholarship for a
general readership, The Cold War contains much new and often
startling information drawn from newly opened Soviet, East
European, and Chinese archives. Now, as America once again
finds itself in a global confrontation with an implacable
ideological enemy, The Cold War tells a story whose lessons
it is vitally necessary to understand.
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