THE COLD WAR

The view of the United States as manfully and selflessly resisting nefarious Communist expansion a view undermined by events, revised by researchers, questioned by students -- shapes this chronicle of crisis after crisis. If it were less blatant, there'd still be doubt as to its suitability: why offer high schoolers a narrow compression of events that are better treated as aspects of history and treated more knowledgeably in adult studies? What we have here is a sequence of headline happenings from Iran to the Victnam War with the tension, even hysteria, that accompanied them; there is virtually no perspective. And there is some small carelessness (e.g. the Enola Gay identified as the plane that dropped the bomb rather than the one that preceded it. Warren Austin identified as a Senator from Maine rather than Vermont) besides the larger obtuseness. In the last chapter the authors seem to be tempering their assessment -- the Cold War construct may be outdated, then call up Khrushchev's blustering ""We will bury you"" as a rebuttal. Hard-line, hard-sell and hardly history.