The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Volume 3)

Description

This volume examines the evolution of the Cold War from the Helsinki Conference of 1975 until the Soviet collapse in 1991. Leading scholars analyze the economic, social, cultural, religious, technological, and geopolitical factors that shaped the policies that ended the Cold War, looking at the personalities and policies of Carter and Reagan, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, Thatcher, Kohl, and Deng Xiaoping. They show how events throughout the world shaped the evolution of Soviet-American relations and also explore the legacies of the super-power confrontation in a comparative and trans-national perspective. Penetrating chapters examine how the Cold War affected and was affected by the environment, the global economy, consumer capitalism, human rights and non-governmental organizations. The authors also deal with demographic trends, capital flows, multilateral institutions, and geopolitical configurations. This is international history at its best: emphasizing social, intellectual, economic and geostrategic trends without losing focus on personalities, politics, and human agency. Review: Essay quality more variable than in the earlier volumes - Whilst I have no reservations about 5*, I was more conscious of variability in the quality of the constituent essays than I had been in either of volumes 1 & 2. The penultimate essay in volume 3 "An Incredibly Swift Transition" strikes me as a masterpiece and there are several others which I also rate extremely highly. There are a few others, though, which strike me as being less well written, of questionable relevance and/or of questionable objectivity. I was more conscious of this in volume 3 than I had been in either of the first two volumes. However, this does not in any way endanger my 5* evaluation either of this individual volume or of the set as a whole. Both the volume and the set achieve their goals superbly. Review: The ultimate global history of the last 80 years - Have at last completed the final volume of this series and can now reflect on what a journey it has been. The extent to which it has determined my broader historical reading and caused me to reconsider my presumed understanding of the great events of the years I have lived through cannot be overestimated. If I had to recommend one set of books for a visitor from the future to get up to speed on the history of our time it would be these provocative, often surprising, and ultimately deeply moving volumes. Being a collection of academic essays means that there is little by way of directly emotionally charged material. But there are facts, quite some of which have only emerged with the opening of archives and declassification of secret documents. And there are numbers, and with sufficient imagination some of these numbers have a powerful emotional jolt of their own. I feel able to describe this as a global history, because although the themes of the Cold War, familiar and unfamiliar, are broken down for examination, its situation in the global contexts of demography and economics, and the political factors such as the United Nations and Non-Aligned movement are also spelled out. While the content preserves academic rigour throughout, the sheer magnitude of the waste, folly and heartless cruelty, both intended and thoughtless, of all sides in this greatest of wars that never happened, cannot help but leave one breathless and appalled.