> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9780241958711
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

The Cold War




The first truly commercial one-volume history of the Cold War

In 1950, when Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-Sung met in Moscow to discuss the future, they had reason to feel optimistic. International Communism seemed everywhere on the offensive: all of Eastern Europe was securely in the Soviet camp; America's monopoly on nuclear weapons was a thing of the past; and Mao's forces had assumed control over the world's most populous country. The story of the previous five decades was one of the worst fears confirmed, and there seemed as of 1950 little sign, at least to the West, that the next fifty years would be any less dark.

In fact, of course, the century's end brought the widespread triumph of political and economic freedom over its ideological enemies. In The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis makes a major contribution to our understanding of this epochal story. Beginning with the Second World War and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age. Now, as Britain once more finds itself in a global confrontation with an implacable ideological enemy, The Cold War tells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand.

  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9780241958711
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

About the author

John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is an internationally renowned historian of the Cold War and has been called 'the dean of Cold War historians' by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and has served as a consultant on the CNN television documentary Cold War. He is also the author of numerous books, is the 2005 winner of the US National Humanities Medal and lives in New Haven.

Also by John Lewis Gaddis

See all