In a well-articulated, arresting argument, Lebow (Political Science/Pittsburgh) and Stein (Political Science/Toronto) assert that the conventional wisdom that the West won the cold war is mistaken, and that military spending and geopolitical rivalry have exhausted the US and the countries of the former USSR, with implications that continue to haunt us today. Lebow and Stein make their case by examining two crises of the cold war: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and 1973 the Arab-Israeli War. In both cases, the authors persuasively argue, the crisis was caused by politicians playing the game of ``deterrence.'' In Cuba, the American threat to use nuclear weapons was an escalation of the crisis; once the superpowers confronted each other, they needed to compromise in order to resolve the impasse (the problem was resolved when both governments agreed to remove missiles). In 1973, the US tried to prevent the Soviet Union from intervening in the Arab-Israeli War by alerting its strategic and conventional forces worldwide. Here, the crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union declined to respond to the alert. The authors argue, based on newly available evidence, that far from deterring the Soviet Union, the US worldwide alert actually might have escalated the crisis; the Soviet Union never had any intention of actually intervening, and a large group in the Kremlin argued that the it should respond by alerting its own forces. After examining how compromise and moderation resolved crises caused by deterrence theorists, Lebow and Stein contend that the nuclear arms race, far from preventing WW III, actually exacerbated superpower tensions and review evidence that Reagan's expansion of defense spending after 1981 delayed rather than accelerated the process of reform in the Soviet Union, which occurred for reasons largely unrelated to the superpower rivalry, and wasted resources urgently needed for domestic purposes. The authors conclude that deterrence prolonged rather than ended the cold war. An intelligent and provocative examination of the legacy of the cold war.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-691-03308-0
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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