An excellent manual on the cold war
I want to recommend this book to any person interested in the cold war. In less than 300 pages the author gives a general overview of the events that took place from the end of the WW2 until the golpe that Eltsin made fail in the ex Urss on 1991. It summarizes many facts in a few pages and makes clear who were the main actors that contributed to feed and ultimately to end the cold war. There are also some comments from the author that help define the importance of the values and of the personalities and above all the reasons why cold war was born and finally ended. I HIGHLY recommend this book

OK, Fine
OK, Fine. I later find this product cheaper IN Denmark.

Everything else went fine and smoothly...

Well researched but offers nothing new
Gaddis offers a concise, readable, and well-documented history of the Cold War. What he does not offer us is a "new" history, as the title promises. This book helped fill in some blanks about the most dangerous period of our history, but I didn't set the book down thinking I had a strongly different view on the event then I could have got from other sources.

I liked how the book allowed you to get in the heads of the various U.S. presidents, and see how they thought about the war--sometimes counterintuitively. However, it seemed like there were things left out. Cambodia is mentioned only in passing on the last page, even though communism hit that country harder than any other, arguably.

The book does seem titled to the idea that the U.S. was the morally superior of the two sides, though Gaddis does not shy away from the darker moments of U.S. geopolitics in the Cold War.

Oddly enough, I walked away hoping that there would be more, not less, retrospective analysis. Just how close was the Soviet Union to collapsing before Reagan took office? Just what might have happened if the United States had not "faught" the Cold War and let the Soviet Union expand and collapse on its own? Normally, scholars tend to get too far out on hypotheticals, but here I find myself wishing he would have spent a little more time on them.

Great condition, good buy for the money
I was impressed with the shipping time.
The book was in great condition.
All positive feedback at this point.

Fantastic -- great for generalists and cold war buffs
Very tighly written book that still manages to produce some fascinating annecdotes (Kruschev and Mao in the pool together) to enliven the narrative. Both myself (a history buff) and my wife (decidedly not a history buff) found it a comprehensive and yet very readiable survey of the Cold War. Its both informative and entertaining. I strongly recommend it.