Teachers: use this as your textbook!!!

books:

	• The Cold War: A History Martin Walker Holt Paperbacks, 1995 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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good read

Walker's book is very complete. He doesn't spend as much time on every event of the cold war, but he omits none.

Walker is also very objective. Probably because he doesn't discuss in gruesome detail the bloodbaths of the Hungarian uprising and the crushing of the Prague Spring, he also refrains from emphasizing the horrors resulting from US policy in Taiwan, Guatemala, Grenada, and many other countries in the third world (for that you need to read the not-so-objective "Killing Hope" by William Blum).

Much of the focus of the book is on the relation between the US, the Soviets, and the Western Europeans, with the main events that took place in the third world included but not analyzed as deeply. He also focusses on the mutual influences between the cold war and world economy and finance, particularly near the end of the book.

I found at times that the writing could have been less convoluted and more to the point, but the book as a whole reads well. For Cold War histories, I still prefer Walter Lafeber's book. But Walker did a good job of discussing what Lafeber only superficially touched in his book. So the two books complement each other very well.

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Misses the Mark. Not Recommended

Instead, I highly recommend the masterpiece book on the Cold War called "The Cold War: A New History" by John Lewis Gaddis. Yale professor Gaddis has been a renowned scholar of the Cold War for decades. In contrast, I do not recommend this book by Martin Walker, who is mainly a newspaper journalist. You can do better.

I read the first seventy pages of this book by Walker and stopped reading it because I thought that the author simply did not "get it right." For starters, the book oddly begins at the end of World War II, when the seeds of the Cold War actually started during World War II, and even before that. USA and USSR emerged from WWII as superpower rivals, distrustful of each other.

The author has a poor understanding of Franklin Roosevelt's strategy towards the end of the war, does not explain Stalin's aspirations, and misunderstands the Truman administration's strategy to deal with Stalin, I believe. I also believe that Walker is far too forgiving of authoritarian communism.

Instead, I highly recommend the "The Cold War: A New History" by John Lewis Gaddis. Another great book by Gaddis is "We Now Know."

Another great book on the Cold War is Ronald Powalski's "The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union 1917-1991," which begins the story of the Cold War in 1917.

Walker's book is also dated. You can do better.

I also recommend the Pulitzer Prize-winning book called "Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire" by David Remnick.

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Great balanced work

While there are many books on the Cold war this one has to be the best. It is the only book I have read that uses voluminous research from not only the American side but the Russian side as well. If you are looking for that fair and balanced viewpoint than this is the place to start. Walker writes very well and covers the relevant aspects of the war including détente. It focuses mostly on the power that the two exhibit and sticks with diplomatic history. There is some discussion of third world (with the exception of Cuba, Vietnam and Egypt) otherwise it really focuses on Europe. Nonetheless it deserves its five stars and is the only book I ever recommend when someone wants to read about the cold war.

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Teachers: use this as your textbook!!!

I took an International Baccalaureate (IB) History course my senior year (along with all other IB subjects) and this was, for all intents and purposes, our textbook for the majority of the year. It was an incredible resource that helped me and my peers get an fresh look at this time period and the heavy use of political subtlety that took place. We realized why it was actually a "war" (it moved us away from the fifth grade formula of 'it was a fight between capitalism and communism that didn't use guns so that's why it was cold') and developed our skills in analyzing the author's viewpoints. If there are any teachers of gifted/accelerated history courses out there, this is your choice for great Cold War material that can be appreciated by 17/18 year olds.

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A good, cheap read.

Before I describe this book, the following needs to be said: This is not a military or Soviet history of the cold war.

That being said, this book is a fine economic and diplomatic history of the Cold War, from an Anglo-American perspective. Whild that may sound like a narrowly-focused book, it really is not, as the author uses well-placed juxtpositions and anecdotes that track the shifting attitudes of NATO Countries and the Soviet Union throughout the war. Particularly interesting is the analysis of each side's economy and the US-USSR tendency to try to bluff each other out.

Reading this book requires sketchy knowledge of the military history of the war.

While there are certainly newer and better general-histories, the unique angle of this book, combined with its bargain price due to age, makes it a great and enlightening read.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

"The history of the Cold War has been the history of the world since 1954." So begins this wide-ranging narrative by an award-winning political commentator, which is the first major study of the Cold War. Now that it is over, it is crucial to our future to understand how the Cold War has shaped us and, especially, to recognize it as the economic and political dynamic that determined the structure of today's global economy.

From the origins of the Marshall Plan, which revived Europe after World War II, and the strategic decision to rebuild a defeated Japan into a bulwark against China to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this authoritative work reveals how the West was built into an economic alliance that overpowered the Soviet economy while also unleashing global economic forces that today challenge the traditional nation-state.

The Cold War was more of a global conflict than was either of this century's two major wars; far more than a confrontation between states or even empires, it was, as Martin Walker puts it "a total war between economic and social systems, an industrial test to destruction."

Walker reminds us how easy it is to forget that there were many occasions for the late 1940s on when victory seemed far from assured, and that lent a particular urgency to the efforts of postwar Western leaders. The West continued to be alarmed by the prospect of defeat right up to the Soviet empire's last breath. At the end of the 1940s the fear was generated by communist expansion into Eastern Europe and China; in the 1960s by the prospect of defeat in Vietnam. In the 1970s the failure of détente and the West's economic crisis brought a new generation of dedicated anti-Communists to prominence. For more than forty years, as this detailed analysis makes clear, the outcome of the Cold War was in doubt.

We also come to understand how the arms race caused new alignments and shifts in domestic power. As the United States became the national security state, California, which had a population of five million at the start of the Cold War, grew to thirty million and, by the 1980s provided one in every ten members of Congress and two presidents.

Using newly opened Kremlin archives and his own experiences in the field, the author has written a brilliant analysis of the conflict that has shaped the contemporary world.

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