Researching the History of the Cold War

"A book of outstanding importance for appreciating our global future as well as understanding the past" Richard Davenport-Hines, The Times Literary Supplement.

"A masterful investigation that will set the standard for Cold War study for years" Jonathan Steele, London Review of Books.

As Germany and later Japan were subdued in 1945, there was great hope that a new and much better world could be created from the moral and physical ruins of the conflict. Instead, the combination of the enormous power of the US and the USSR and the almost complete collapse of most of their adversaries created a unique, bleak new environment: the Cold War.

For over forty years, the demands of the Cold War shaped the lives of almost all of us. There was no part of the world where the East and West ultimately did not demand blind and absolute loyalty, and nowhere that the West and the East did not reach. Countries that were far apart, like Korea, Angola, and Cuba, were defined by their alliances. Almost all civil wars became proxy conflicts for the superpowers. Europe seemed to have been indefinitely divided in two.

Arne Westad's remarkable new book is the first to have the distance from those events and the ambition to create a compelling, powerful narrative of the Cold War. The book has a truly global scope and captures the dramatic and painful moments of a period always overshadowed by the terror of nuclear war and which, for millions of people, was not "cold" at all: a time of relentless violence, missed opportunities, and moral failure.

Pages: 720, Dimensions: 13x13cm