A well-balanced and illuminating history of the Cold War.
The Cold War began under murky and not entirely planned circumstances governed by individual personalities. So, writes Leffler (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953, 1994, etc.), did it end, thanks to two personalities in particular.
The U.S. and the Soviet Union made sometimes uncomfortable allies in the war against Hitler, but they were allies all the same. When that war ended, Leffler observes, there was a world to divide up; Stalin had his agenda, but so did Harry Truman, who demanded that America enjoy 85 percent of any given pie rather than a nice 50-50 split. Stalin took a dim view of that math; and in all events, when the U.S. announced that it would never again be caught napping or give up its military superiority, and that it would “hold the atomic bomb as a ‘sacred trust’ for all mankind,” Stalin felt hemmed in, even blackmailed. Leffler does a creditable job of depicting the ensuing Cold War from the point of view of the Soviet leadership as well as from the already well-documented American one, and he turns up surprises: one, for instance, that the Soviet leadership, urged along by Lavrentiy Beria, was exploring the possibility of allowing German to reunify as a neutral power, a far better alternative in his mind than “a permanently unstable socialist Germany whose survival relied on the support of the Soviet Union.” That plan went nowhere: Stalin died; Beria was executed; and another generation of East-West confrontation would ensue. Leffler’s interest lies in the personalities of the leaders who enabled détente, and finally an end to the Cold War—foremost among them, in his assessment, Mikhail Gorbachev, who “made the most fundamental alterations in his own thinking” in order to accept a fundamental shift in the world’s political order. (Reagan had something to do with it, too, writes Leffler. But Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev? Useless.)
A well-balanced and illuminating history of the Cold War.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9717-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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