May 12 2024
Some twenty years after publication, The Cold War no longer matches its subtitle, “A New History,” but it remains a useful book about the conflict that shaped international politics for nearly half a century and, not incidentally, came close to ending human civilization. It is useful in a number of ways. First of all, it …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/05/12/the-cold-war-by-john-lewis-gaddis/
Nov 24 2014
The subtitle may raise eyebrows, but the author argues that we defeated the North Koreans and were in turn defeated by the Communist Chinese. The figure of MacArthur looms large in this story, a figure of genius compounded with hubris. The Inchon landing was such an astoundingly successful maneuver that thereafter the Joint Chiefs and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/11/24/korea-the-first-war-we-lost-by-bevin-alexander/
Sep 17 2014
This was a fascinating story of a cat and mouse game in which it is never quite clear who is the cat and who is the mouse. It blows to bits the James Bond mythology of what spying is about: it is a dirty, dirty business, and the people who engage in it are hardly …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-by-john-le-carre/
Sep 02 2014
In this book Le Carre succeeds in doing what he failed to do in Tinker Tailor: creating characters that the reader actually cares about, as a well as a plot involving a covert operation whose outcome is not merely a an academic move in a geopolitical chess game. I identify in some ways with the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/02/the-mission-song-by-john-le-carre/
Feb 02 2012
The author argues that the Cold War’s beginning was not in 1945 but in 1917. Some of his other judgments are even more controversial. He reveals that the Cuban missile crisis was not the only time during the Cold War when the United States went on DEFCON 3 alert, he believes Diem’s assassination in Vietnam …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2012/02/02/a-brief-history-of-the-cold-war-by-colonel-john-hughes-wilson/
Oct 22 2011
Read this book years ago, but it was worth rereading. This is mostly told from the Western and American side, chronicling the steps and missteps that American policy makers took to counter the threat of communist expansionism. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan all get their share of due credit, but ironically the President on whose …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2011/10/22/the-cold-war-by-martin-walker/
Feb 03 2009
This was a more or less conventional history of the Korean War, focusing on Cold War strategies and policies. It notes that the Korean Was the first and only war in which the major powers…the Soviet Union, China, the United States, and its allies…actually engaged in direct armed conflict with each other. MacArthur is given …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/02/03/the-korean-war-1950-1953-by-carter-malkasian/
Al Singh
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Robert Maedgen
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The Shire