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iceberg0's review against another edition
2.0
A serviceable if somewhat pedestrian survey of the cold war.
stevenyenzer's review against another edition
3.0
Solid historical review for anyone as lacking as I was in an overview of the Cold War. I wasn’t necessarily onboard with all of Gaddis’s ideological arguments, but the facts are here and presented in a very reasonable format.
thejdizzler's review against another edition
3.0
I was a bit disappointed with this history. It followed the standard narrative of communism==bad, inefficient and oppressive and democracy==good and kind of glossed over a lot of the conflicts in Africa and the Americas that I was very interested in learning more about. Gaddis however, does build a compelling narrative around themes and people, rather than just around facts.
rschmidt7's review against another edition
3.0
Decent primer on the Cold War, but despite the subtitle, this book offers nothing new. If you know anything about the Cold War, this is simply a rehash of well-known history. The only audience for this book would be students who have never learned anything about the Cold War. For them, it is a clear, broad overview. There are much better entries in Cold War history, however, so this seems like an unnecessary addition to the field.
sweeneysays's review against another edition
2.0
I kept all of my Cold War books from college and recently I decided to start doing actual cover-to-cover readings of them. I stated with this one, mostly because it was both on the shorter end and broad in its scope.
Gaddis set out to cover more years in fewer pages and create an accessible book for contemporary American college students, for whom The Cold War has always been history rather than current events.
He succeeds in that objective. The book is immensely readable and the thematic grouping of events is a nice touch, and a sensible one when surveying an ideological conflict.
That said, his introductory note about how he won't pretend not to know the outcome of the struggle is a shoddy justification for a very lopsided characterization. While Soviet sins are stated as outright, American offenses are framed as "what the Soviets thought" even though it's pretty well acknowledged, for example, that we deliberately let our "ally" bleed out in WWII. American diplomats are charismatic while their Soviet counterparts are "oily." Weird shit like that, again, and again. (Save for Gorbachev, who Gaddis has lots of good words for.) It's not so much that Gaddis's view is wrong, so much as it gives the whole book very propaganda-laden feel that I could never quite get over. In his quest to cover more ground in less pages and bundle it into big themes, he makes a lot of sweeping generalizations and I think I'd forgive it more easily if he articulated it that way. That is: admit that this is more than just acknowledgement of the victor -- it's heavy-handed deference to it.
Gaddis set out to cover more years in fewer pages and create an accessible book for contemporary American college students, for whom The Cold War has always been history rather than current events.
He succeeds in that objective. The book is immensely readable and the thematic grouping of events is a nice touch, and a sensible one when surveying an ideological conflict.
That said, his introductory note about how he won't pretend not to know the outcome of the struggle is a shoddy justification for a very lopsided characterization. While Soviet sins are stated as outright, American offenses are framed as "what the Soviets thought" even though it's pretty well acknowledged, for example, that we deliberately let our "ally" bleed out in WWII. American diplomats are charismatic while their Soviet counterparts are "oily." Weird shit like that, again, and again. (Save for Gorbachev, who Gaddis has lots of good words for.) It's not so much that Gaddis's view is wrong, so much as it gives the whole book very propaganda-laden feel that I could never quite get over. In his quest to cover more ground in less pages and bundle it into big themes, he makes a lot of sweeping generalizations and I think I'd forgive it more easily if he articulated it that way. That is: admit that this is more than just acknowledgement of the victor -- it's heavy-handed deference to it.
billblume's review against another edition
4.0
I'm glad I did this as an audiobook, because while I was engaged with the material, I think it might have been a little more difficult to read through it in print. Gaddis does a great job providing an overview of the Cold War. He acknowledges that he's boiling it down a lot to make it easier for the layman to consume. Perhaps the thing that impresses me most about the book is that even though I lived through the last third of the Cold War, Gaddis makes me appreciate how much I didn't know or understand what was going on between the key players. I can't speak for how someone who didn't live through this book will react to it, but I can say that for myself, who was born in 1973, this proved fascinating to explore.