Category: Cold War Era
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Martin Luther King Jr.: A Life (2002) by Marshall Frady
In the introduction “Martin Luther King Jr.: A Life,” Marshall Frady argues that Americans have sought “to remember King by forgetting him,” suggesting that the civil rights leader was never a mere painted icon and that current and future generations actually do him a disservice by remembering him that way. In this trim biography of…
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The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama
Toward the end of the Cold War, three very different books were published within five years of each other that sought to explain the likely contours of the inchoate new world order emerging from the implosion of the communist bloc: David Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” 1989); Francis Fukuyama’s “The End…
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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2003) by William Taubman
Nikita Khushchev was an unlikely giant of the twentieth century. His improbable decades-long march to supreme leadership of a world girdling communist empire was matched only by his improbably well-orchestrated fall from power in 1964. The riddle that Tubman seeks to unwrap in this excellent single-volume biography is: How exactly did someone like Khrushchev, this…
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Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011) by Ezra F. Vogel
“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” This is how Ezra Vogel concludes his massive 700-page tome, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” Indeed, who else in history has…
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Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary (1998) by Juan Williams
Long before he was a controversial commentator on NPR and then FOX News, Juan Williams was a distinguished chronicler of the US Civil Rights era. “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” was published in 1998, a half-decade after the legendary civil rights lawyer (but rather forgettable Supreme Court justice, according to this book) passed away at age…
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Murrow: His Life and Times (1999) by A.M. Sperber
In late 2014, when I was reading this book (first published in 1986), Richard C. Hottelet, the last of the original “Murrow’s Boys,” died in Connecticut at the age of 97. There is so much about Edward R. Murrow’s story that feels old and distant – grainy black-and-white telecasts and lots of cigarette smoking –…
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The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014) by Kai Bird
Unfortunately, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as thorny, intractable and relevant in 2016 as it was thirty-plus years ago when the civil war in Beirut dominated the headlines. This page-turner of a book, “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames” by Kai Bird is a fabulous view into the reality of late twentieth…
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President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime (1991) by Lou Cannon
Ronald Reagan isn’t the kind of president that many Americans are on the fence about. Either you love him and believe he belongs in the pantheon of great presidents alongside Washington, Lincoln and FDR or you think he is one of the most incompetent (albeit lucky) chief executives in American history. Lou Cannon’s “President Reagan:…
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Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (2006) by Victor Sebestyen
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was one of the most remarkable events of the Cold War. Seemingly out of nowhere, and quite improbably, an entire people bravely rose up against the ruling communist party and the occupying Red Army. And for a brief moment, and even more improbably, they were victorious. Victor Sebestyen, a British citizen…
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