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The Cold War: A New History By John Lewis Gaddis

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The Cold War: A New History written by John Lewis Gaddis is an audacious attempt at describing a conflict that lasted in excess of forty years within the confines of a two hundred page book. Gaddis expertly accomplished the task of compressing four decades of geopolitical unrest between two superpowers that brought the phrase “Mutual Assured Destruction” into America’s lexicon. In the preface of his book Professor Gaddis (2007) states this was written to be a short, comprehensive and accessible book on the Cold War. (p. 9) Some chapters seem to brush briefly over milestone events in our nation's history in order to keep the read light, leaving the opportunity for the reader to conduct further research to gain more precise information. The need to omit detail is not a negative against the author as long as the reader understands that this is more of an overview and not a detailed depiction of the of every event that took place during throughout the span of the war.

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The United States of America (USA) believed in a system of limited government that had little capacity to control the daily lives of its citizens. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on the other hand lived under a much more authoritarian government that offered little to no liberty to those within. World War II forced these two wholly different nations into an alliance to defeat Nazi Germany after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Professor John Lewis Gaddis begins the task of explaining this cold war by describing the circumstances that brought these two nations together. The Cold War: A New History has only a little over two hundred pages to describe events that changed the world and lasted more than four

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he first chapter of The Cold War: A New History begins by comparing the United States to the U.S.S.R. and talking about the similarities between the two. It also talks about Communism and how Marx deemed it necessary in order to build up the economy. Lenin tried to implement Communism in Russia. They were not quite ready for that kind of system, so Stalin tried to modernize the economy. The U.S.S.R. had more casualties in World War II, but things were not necessarily looking great in America either.

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