Really bad history... - Rated 
Silly, jingoistic, pulp history shot through with half truths, unsupported and unsupportable claims and distortions. John Lewis Gaddis is a history professor at Yale University but how he can draw so many stupid conclusions from the Cold War is beyond me. Nobody in their right mind would say that Joe Stalin was a good guy, nor would they be likely to say his successors were freedom loving liberals either but the standard neo-con treatment these days is to score points with heavy handed jingoism rather than presenting history as it happened. I'm sorely tempted to call it propaganda.
The layout of the book is extremely poor and jumps from one thing to another without any real semblance of method. You will find yourself reading about Stalin one minute, then Kruschev the next and finally back to Stalin again. Very confusing and giving the appearance that he has something of an obsession with Stalin.
His assertion that the US achieved its amazing industrial power due to a lack of Government intervention is a neo-con line which is not supported in fact. Most US Government war contracts were designed to fulfil Government specifications. His claim that Americans in 1945 lived in the freest society on the planet is unsupportable. Obviously he has never been to Australia, New Zealand or Eire. When he said nobody knows how the Berlin Blockade started, I couldn't believe my eyes! Both Hilton and Taylor explain it in their respective books on the Berlin Wall.
He spends barely a page on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and scarcely bothers to explain that the missiles were installed because of fears that the US would invade after the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion the year before. Asserting that this information has only just been released from Soviet archives does nothing for the argument. Blind Freddy could have seen that.
When the Soviets or the Chinese cracked down on insurgencies in their own territories or those of a client state, Gaddis digs deep for another triumphant assertion that the US never did this but does not concede that the states they supported most certainly did, especially the dictatorships they cheerfully installed in Central and South America. Later in the book he does point out the activities undertaken by the CIA in South America but by then it's scarcely relevant.
Another example of his oversimplified a polarised view is that all the US leaders were great and all the Communist leaders were murderers. Nobody would deny the issues but a better explanation of their reasons goes begging for the duration of the book. I am most decidedly a Kennedy fan but he oversimplifies the margins between western and communist leaders to the point that it is no longer representative of reality. A decided point of view can be a strong point of a book but when there is no clear, clinical analysis (devoid of political agendas), the real issues go missing from a book where they should be paramount and people simply end up misinformed. How he could write a book like this and barely mention the UK and especially the role of MI6, is truly a wonder of the world.
This is junk. How it got such rave reviews I haven't the faintest idea. His oversimplified, polarised points of view do nothing to give the reader any insight into what really happened. Both Christopher Hilton and Frederick Taylor wrote better Cold War history in their books on the Berlin Wall. So did David Stafford in his book "Spies Beneath Berlin". All these authors point out the shortcomings of the Eastern Bloc system, Stalinism and the murderous repression of democratic principles. If this book is where history is going then I lament the passing of truth and objectivity. This is rubbish. Avoid it like the plague.
Fantastic As An Introduction... - Rated 
I, like many others, had my interest in the cold war peaked by glamorous tales of espionage and horrific tales of near nuclear holocaust. The only problem was, I found myself lacking any real knowledge of events leading to the birth of the cold war or any real facts about the war itself other than 'Kennedy didn't really get on with those Russians and Cubans'.
This book gave me the opportunity to change that. Don't get me wrong; I do not, after reading this book, consider myself to now be an expert on the cold war, and if you consider yourself to be an expert, don't even give this book a second look, (I was going to say 'don't give this book a chance' but then felt that this was an unfair comment).
It's an information packed book and a history told with a clear, fluid dialect.
My one problem with this book is the discussion of the Korean War where the author indulges himself in a 'What If' scenario without informing the reader until a few paragraphs later that this was a fictional possibility. However, this is probably brought on by the fact that I had sent a text message to my dad stating boldly, 'This book is so wrong... I know for a fact no atomic or hydrogen weapon has ever been used in aggression other than on Japanese soil', realizing in the next paragraph that I'm a hot headed fool.
Moral of the review...
John Lewis Gaddis has written a very good introduction to a subject that should be taught in schools so that we, as a species, can learn from our mistakes but also that I... am a 'jump to conclusions' idiot.
Very One Sided - Rated 
As a read, the book is good (why it gets 2 stars.) As an objective book of the Cold War it is not. For a proffessional critique of this book see David Painter's review 'A Partial History of the Cold War.' in Cold War History, 6:4, 527 - 534.
It ignores a lot of recent work on the Cold War and presents as 'fact' things that are not universally agreed on. If your view of the Cold War is based solely on this book then you will struggle to objectively analyse the Cold War. It is a shame for an academic as renowned as Gaddis to completely ignore other sides of the argument, he may not agree with them but it is right to acknowledge their existence. If you are looking for something more objective try Zubok & Pleshakov's 'Inside the Kremlin's Cold War' or anything by Len Scott.
A Cold War Student
Very readable introduction to the topic - Rated
Being relatively ignorant of the cold war and its causes, I picked up this book on a whim. I've found it very readable, gripping really, in the manner of a bestseller. The protagonists of the drama of the century past are laid out well, and if you can see past the tendency for the book to portay democratic/egalitarian values as having started from a moral high ground, very educational. Surprisingly, a light and filling read
Going back to my youth - Rated 
as I get to middle age (42..) I'm looking back at all sorts and re-reading "o" level novels etc to see what more I get out of them. As an A level history student I studied and lived through the cold war and this was a superb way to re-open the door and reactivate my interest in the subject. If amazon allow a sales plug, I'd suggest a read of this followed by a trip to the national cold war museum at Cosford, informative and scary.
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