The Cold War

· Penguin UK
8 reviews
Ebook
352
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

A brilliantly arresting historical work, John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War takes us as never before to the time when the world stood on the brink of destruction.

In 1945 war came to an end. But a whole new terror was only just beginning...

Here is the truth behind every spy thriller you've read: why America and the Soviet Union became locked in a deadly stalemate; how close we came to nuclear catastrophe; what was really going on in the minds of leaders from Stalin to Mao Zedong, Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, how secret agents plotted and East German holidaymakers helped the Berlin Wall fall. It is a story of crisis talks and subterfuge, tyrants and power struggles - and of ordinary people changing the course of history.

A brilliantly arresting historical work, John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War takes us as never before to the time when the world stood on the brink of destruction. In 1945 war came to an end. But a whole new terror was only just beginning... Here is the truth behind every spy thriller you've read: ...

Ratings and reviews

8 reviews
Søs Káyy
February 11, 2026
Very Helpful To A Historian
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David Hynes
May 11, 2026
very thought provoking read
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About the author

John Lewis Gaddis is an internationally renowned historian of the Cold War and has been called 'the dean of Cold War historians' by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and has served as a consultant on the CNN television documentary Cold War. He is also the author of numerous books, including The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972), Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982), We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), The Landscape of History (2002) and Surprise, Security and the American Experience (2004). He is a 2005 winner of the US National Humanities Medal and lives in New Haven.
John Lewis Gaddis is an internationally renowned historian of the Cold War and has been called 'the dean of Cold War historians' by The New York Times. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project and ha...

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