Londons Falling

Mission Accomplished

Rating: 5/5
Comments:
This book accomplishes the goal that it sets for itself. Gaddis sets out to write a concise history of the Cold War and manages to do it in 267 pages. The book is fascinating. While it doesn't get too deep into any details (hence the concise part) it covers the overall strategies and themes of the Cold War in sharp detail. One of the most interesting elements of the book is that he describes well the personalities that make things tick. In one of the final sections of the book he makes clear that the Cold War ends the way that it does because of the unique personalities that were influential at the time. The book does a very good job of conveying the sense of hope and wonder at the mostly peaceful dissolution of a conflict that some people thought would end the world. The book is clearly written and accessible, event to those whose historical knowledge of the period is mostly basic. Well done!

Good introduction but biased and simplistic

Rating: 3/5
Comments:
I bought this book because I was interested in a quick overview of the Cold War, from which I could choose other books to fill in the gaps on topics that I find interest me. In that respect, it is a decent book, and I have purchased two other books to continue learning ('The Making of a Counter Culture' by Theodore Roszak and 'Blacked Out' by Alasdair Roberts).

The problem with this book is that it has far too much of a 'good vs evil' theme. I would have liked to have seen more of a 'ideology vs ideology' or 'imperialist vs imperialist' theme, which would have helped go beyond simple caricatures of the two nations.

I was quite disappointed to see how much the book portrayed Gorbachev as an enlightened hero while only casually mentioning that he was quite hated in Russia. Also, there was almost no mention of Solzhenitsyn - how is that possible?

If you do decide to read this book, I suggest you supplement it with the following to help balance things out:
'Overthrow' by Stephen Kinzer
'The Two Souls of Socialism' by Hal Draper (available free online)

The US has undertaken many unethical and brutal endeavors over the past 100+ years. Also, there's strong elements of 'socialism' in nearly all industrialized nations, but without despotic regimes and popular oppression. The term 'socialism' is actually quite broad and has dramatically different meanings depending on which model you read - modern social democracy and democratic socialism have proven to provide a substantially better standard of living than what you'll find in the US.

Reasonable Approach to a Difficult Project

Rating: 3/5
Comments:
In the introduction, Gaddis sets the context for this book: the topic is not familiar to young people, and various students and others familiar with his scholarship wished for a much shorter, more easily digestible work on the entire subject of the Cold War.

Given this framework, the author arguably does a decent job. No-one could take on such an enormous topic and boil it down to so few pages without its resulting in a certain degree of superficiality and selectivity (to the point of excluding what many will believe is important information).

As someone who heard about these events when I was very young, Gaddis' approach results in a narrative that sounds very familiar and hence strikes me as fairly conventional. I personally disagreed with the author's assessment of some major figures, finding his appreciation of Ronald Reagan reminiscent of the characters in the film _Being There_, who thought they perceived genius in the strategic simplicity of someone who really *was*, well, simple. However, since one of the Amazon reader-reviewers I sampled found the book much too liberal and *politically correct,* obviously Gaddis did not take the most arch-conservative approach possible. If one of my children were getting his/her overview of the Cold War from this book, I would wish that the author offered a bit of commentary on the potentially negative outcomes (e.g., violent fundamentalist zealotry) that could arise from labeling one or another political system as biblically evil (instead of implying, as I think he does, that this was just a great PR strategy for the propagation of Democracy). However, it's easy to see how trying to be so inclusive could easily blow the book up to multi-volume size.

Would I personally pick other details to offer in such a short book on a long topic? Probably. However, Gaddis' book is a reasonably good survey and entry point for a person new to learning about the Cold War.