From Publishers Weekly
The period from 1946 until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 is usually interpreted in ideological, political and cultural contexts. But the two dozen essays included in this anthology by Cowley (the founding editor of
Military History Quarterly and the editor of two previous
MHQ anthologies) show that while the superpowers may never have measured strengths on a large scale, armed encounters between them occurred regularly. Even during the Cold War's alleged waning years, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came close to the edge of nuclear exchange—without U.S. policymakers really being aware of it. Cowley's contributors, including such outstanding military historians as John Guilmartin, Victor Davis Hanson and Williamson Murray, demonstrate how the Cold War's military history was directly shaped by patterns of provocation and misunderstanding. In a general context, the controlling factor was the Soviet Union's continued inability to achieve its primary strategic objective, the conquest of Western Europe, without initiating a nuclear exchange that would destroy the U.S.S.R. Soviet plans thus became self-deterring, and ultimately self-defeating. But Cowley's selections also show that this process was neither automatic nor predictable, and his anthology is a correspondingly thought-provoking read.
(Sept. 13) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
Taking a page from Cowley's three well--received anthologies, on World War II (
No End Save Victory, 2001), World War I (
The Great War, 2003), and the
Civil War (With My Face to the Enemy, 2001), his latest deploys a platoon of military historians to narrate both the archetypical and the nearly forgotten moments of a world-defining conflict. In folding cold war classics like the Berlin Airlift and U-2 spy-plane intrigue into one volume with substantial treatments of Korea and Vietnam, however, this book may be the most ambitious collection so far; each major conflict probably could have supported its own volume. Nevertheless, most of the essays in this collection are excellent: Simon Winchester's discussion of the
Amethyst incident in China and John Prados' essay on the near-Armageddon of 1983 are particularly noteworthy in capturing their close scrapes with grace and perspective. Although the devout may be disappointed that some prominent contributors' essays are reprints from familiar sources--David McCullough's excellent section on Truman and MacArthur culled from
Truman, for example--librarians should expect high demand for this broad and weighty selection.
Brendan DriscollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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