Saturday, January 14, 2006
Gaddis: The Cold War
In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Michael Beschloss reviews John Lewis Gaddis' new book, The Cold War
:
I am most of the way through it myself, and I couldn't agree more. If you lived through that era and want to study it from some altitude, Gaddis' work is the book to beat. If you are so young that you cannot imagine why the world's leaders ran the risks they ran, you will gain the essential perspective that your youth deprives you of! More later, no doubt.
:In 1991, as the Soviet Union was cracking up, one of President George H. W. Bush's senior foreign policy officials told me, "You historians are going to have a hard time explaining to the Americans of the future why we thought the cold war was so dangerous for 45 years." He was right. By 2006, Americans too young to have lived through the era of duck-and-cover drills require a scholar of extraordinary gifts to tell why nine cold-war presidents deployed our national treasure against an empire that broke apart so clumsily in the end.
John Lewis Gaddis is that scholar, and "The Cold War: A New History" is the book they should read.
I am most of the way through it myself, and I couldn't agree more. If you lived through that era and want to study it from some altitude, Gaddis' work is the book to beat. If you are so young that you cannot imagine why the world's leaders ran the risks they ran, you will gain the essential perspective that your youth deprives you of! More later, no doubt.
2 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Sun Jan 15, 01:37:00 PM:
I just started it, but it's great so far.
By Elam Bend, at
Sun Jan 15, 09:17:00 PM:
I was a freshman in HS when the wall fell. I remember the fear of the USSR and remember not really percieving a world without them.
Yet, often when pondering over some particular direction of foreign policy in the past have to remind myself that the cold war was occurring to explain why certain decisions were made.
