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THE COLD WAR

Name: THE COLD WAR
Author: Odd Arne Westad
ISBN: 978-0-465-05493-0

A WORLD HISTORY

by Odd Arne Westad ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017

A tremendous and timely history lesson for our age.

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A sweeping study of the “bipolar” struggle between the two superpowers that moved from ideological conflict to permanent military confrontation.

In astute, thematic chapters, Bancroft Award–winning historian Westad (U.S.–Asia Relations/Harvard Univ.; Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, 2012, etc.) offers an excellent sense of the ideological conflicts fulminating since the late 19th century that formed the crux of the Cold War. The forces of modernity that were rapidly and profoundly transforming society in Europe and America were also creating vast swaths of human misery, and socialism and communism rose to support “the ordinary men and women who were being thrown into capitalism’s centrifuge.” Proceeding chronologically, the author shows how these movements of workers joined other campaigns—e.g., women’s rights and anti-colonialism—to present a challenge to the rise of American power in the 20th century. Thus the “sharpening of the ideological divide between capitalism and its critics” found its momentum from one world war to the next, as the U.S. strove to “make the world safe for democracy” at the same time Russia expanded in a different, revolutionary direction. Westad emphasizes that the generation that shaped the Cold War was the same caught in the nightmare of World War I, and both struggles contained the same elements: “fear, uncertainty, the need for something to believe in, and the demand to create a better world.” This is an enormous story, and the author tackles it with admirable clarity and elegance, effectively laying out the positions of the two superpowers and their essential distrust of the other. From the “iron curtain” speech of Winston Churchill, “loss” of China to the Communists, tragedy of the Korean War, process of decolonization in Africa and Latin America, and the “age of Brezhnev” and Nixon in Beijing, Westad moves methodically through the stages of the Cold War. One of the essential themes is continually sounded: why, in the end, the Western model proved more attractive than that of the Soviets.

A tremendous and timely history lesson for our age.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-465-05493-0

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017

Categories:

HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICAN CULTURE

by Robert M. Crunden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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Reworking a book first published abroad, Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin) provides readers in these United States with a useful overview of their cultural history. The narrative presents American creative endeavor as gradually increasing in scale and growing more integrated into the world. Crunden (American Salons, 1992, etc.) begins with ``local culture,'' looking in turn at Puritan Boston, Enlightened Philadelphia, and the Virginia of the Founding Fathers. Discussing the subsequent era of North, South, and West, he shifts his emphasis from culture's religious and political dimensions toward the fine arts. Especially strong pages treat Washington Irving and John James Audubon. Somewhat scanting the Civil War, Crunden moves quickly to a discussion of the national culture that found progressives and pragmatists tempering capitalist excesses. Mini- biographies—e.g., of William and Henry James, of Alice Hamilton- -convey much information. Paradoxically, the emergence of international modernism crowns Crunden's narrative of the specifically American. Charles Ives and Frank Lloyd Wright, we find, were following European leads by formalizing indigenous national styles. The author further gestures toward an apotheosis of the American with a final section on ``cosmopolitan culture.'' A profile of William F. Buckley Jr. nicely encapsulates the emergence of a ``conservative hegemony,'' while an examination of T. Coraghessan Boyle's fiction as exemplary post-60s literature works surprisingly well. Crunden represents contemporary academic thought by rehashing David Lehman's denunciations of Paul de Man and followers—this is a letdown in the wake of his superb account of transatlantic intellectual exchange around the time of the Second World War. But this history aspires to start, not finish, debates over coverage; its risky choices work to stimulate rather than to conceal. Leavening common information with uncommon insights and skillfully managing—without directly addressing—the difficulties of its mission, Crunden's work should provoke fine conversations on what Americans might want to say next.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55778-705-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY

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THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM

THE UNITED STATES AND THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR, 1917-1953

by Melvyn P. Leffler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

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A brief but thoughtful essay outlining the terrible misapprehensions that led to escalating tensions between the US and the Soviet Union from the close of WW I to the end of the Korean conflict. Although anti-Bolshevik feelings ran high even at the time of the Russian Revolution, fear of the USSR didn't dominate American foreign policy until after WW II. Drawing on materials newly available from Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives, Leffler (winner of the 1993 Bancroft Prize for A Preponderance of Power) deftly traces the history of US-Soviet relations in prÇcis, from the Bolsheviks' rise to power through the uneasy truce in Korea. Begining as an ideological clash, the tension between the two nations only gradually became a power struggle as well. Indeed, it was only when the USSR became a player on the same global scale as the US (albeit considerably weaker in key strategic areas after the pounding it took during WW II) that the Soviets were perceived as an active threat abroad. On the other hand, seen through the distorting mirror of obsessive anti-Communism, domestic American radicals were regarded as a danger almost from the first murmur of the word ``Bolshevik'' in the popular press, and it was the specter of homegrown subversion rather than foreign invasion that haunted American policies for a long time. Leffler retells this often familiar material methodically, using the new documentation to reveal Stalin as hesitant and tentative in foreign policy, primarily concerned with erecting a security buffer around Russia rather than building an evil empire. The portrait that emerges is of two superpowers-in-formation engaged in a grim dialogue of the deaf, with terrible consequences for humanity. Although much of the ground covered is well trod, this is an admirably complete introduction to the history of the Cold War.