The Cold War: A New History Book

If you asked the 10 best historians in the world to write a history of the Cold War in under 250 pages, you would get back 10 works that were overly broad, sweeping, slanted, and/or missing key facts. Gaddis hasn't avoided all these pitfalls, but it's an excellent effort, and most important for his target audience, the book is eminently readable. He creates a sense of urgency and page-turning suspense in a book that describes the history of a war that never actually got "hot." His political leanings and his triumphalism aside, he does a fantastic job of capturing the key players, motives, and events of the Cold War for a generation that has been raised after the falling of the Berlin Wall-- scary, huh?