Rating: 
Summary: The Cold War is a hot read
Review: A very good outline of 1945-1991 and a couple of years afterwards. I learned a lot of new things about the conflict (that the Soviets didn't really want to invade Afghanistan, JFK was elected on an anti-Communist hawk platform, Britain since WWII), although I do agree with other reviewers that he left out many things. Walker spends about 70% of his time on the west and 30% on the Soviets in each decade, so the Evil Empire's motives and actions are a bit murky. Britain from the mid-sixties to the Thatcher era is dropped. And he does spend a lot of time on the economic markets of post-war Europe & Japan, that while interesting to me at first, I bought the book for history not economics. But those are just quibbles. Overall, the book is a good start for anyone wanting to know about the Cold War.
Rating: 
Summary: Communism's genocidal tendencies DO warrant a moral contrast
Review: After Stephane Coutois'"THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM:CRIMES,REPRESSION,TERROR"it is irresponsible to avoid making the necessary MORAL,POLITRICAl,PHILOSOPHICAL judgements and comparisons between the systems that faced each other for fifty years. The book "THE COLD WAR:A HISTORY" by Martin Walker is a good overview of the period.It adresses the major "flashpoints"of the period,personalities involved and repercussions in the overall conflict.However,it is nowhere near the comprehensive "THE FIFTY YEAR WAR:CONFLICT AND STRATEGY IN THE COLD WAR" by Norman Friedman.Many things are quite simplified or low profiled thus giving an account not up to date to what all archival and testimonial evidence shows irrefutably:The Cold War was indeed an ideological confrontation between freedom against tyranny,that the evil we(freedom loving people those refered to as "we" are-mind you!)faced very well matched Nazi terror corpse by corpse-even surpassed it,and that the struggle was pursued agressively,relentlessly by the USSR with global hegemony as the only satisfactory end result. Should we avoid to make moral judgements about the Gulag system and its copies in Vietnam and Cuba when we make those same judgements about the Nazi concentration camp system ?Sad moral relativism....that's one of the reasons we keep making the same mistakes trough history over and over again."THE COLD WAR"avoidance of profound evaluation of Communism's acts that may hurt(?)those which appeased,supported or belittled the threat of Communism during the period is acting like an ostrich.The author is too timid in dealing with the nature of the USSR and its allies/satellites. So the book is not anti-communist in the same way a book dealing with WW II may not be anti-Nazi.But THAT would be a major flaw,is not it?Maybe he shied away of that in order not to be labeled "anti-communist" Sad moral relativism....Thats why we Humans keep repeating our mistakes over and over again.And history books should be about learnig from history and not washing it out
Rating:
Summary: Communism's genocidal tendencies DO warrant a moral contrast
Review: After Stephane Coutois'"THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM:CRIMES,REPRESSION,TERROR"it is irresponsible to avoid making the necessary MORAL,POLITRICAl,PHILOSOPHICAL judgements and comparisons between the systems that faced each other for fifty years. The book "THE COLD WAR:A HISTORY" by Martin Walker is a good overview of the period.It adresses the major "flashpoints"of the period,personalities involved and repercussions in the overall conflict.However,it is nowhere near the comprehensive "THE FIFTY YEAR WAR:CONFLICT AND STRATEGY IN THE COLD WAR" by Norman Friedman.Many things are quite simplified or low profiled thus giving an account not up to date to what all archival and testimonial evidence shows irrefutably:The Cold War was indeed an ideological confrontation between freedom against tyranny,that the evil we(freedom loving people those refered to as "we" are-mind you!)faced very well matched Nazi terror corpse by corpse-even surpassed it,and that the struggle was pursued agressively,relentlessly by the USSR with global hegemony as the only satisfactory end result. Should we avoid to make moral judgements about the Gulag system and its copies in Vietnam and Cuba when we make those same judgements about the Nazi concentration camp system ?Sad moral relativism....that's one of the reasons we keep making the same mistakes trough history over and over again. "THE COLD WAR"avoidance of profound evaluation of Communism's acts that may hurt(?)those which appeased,supported or belittled the threat of Communism during the period is acting like an ostrich.The author is too timid in dealing with the nature of the USSR and its allies/satellites. So the book is not anti-communist in the same way a book dealing with WW II may not be anti-Nazi.But THAT would be a major flaw,is not it?Maybe he shied away of that in order not to be labeled "anti-communist" Sad moral relativism....Thats why we Humans keep repeating our mistakes over and over again.And history books should be about learnig from history and not washing it out
Rating: 
Summary: If David Calleo requires it . . .
Review: Although I have not read this book, I picked it up years ago, and only recently in cleaning did I donate it to the local library. Much to my dismay, upon returning to school (Johns Hopkis School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)), to complete my masters, David Calleo, one of my professors and a godfather of European studies, requires this text for his class. If David Calleo requires it, then it can't be that bad. I will update the review when I finish the book and the class.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly biased
Review: I'd give this a 2.5 rating if it were possible. It sits squarely in the middle due to the fact that the author doesn't even try to present an unbiased review of the events; and his writing style also makes it somewhat difficult to read. If you can skim out the cruft of the author's opinions, and instead pay attention to the historical events, you'll do Ok.
Rating:
Summary: amazing!
Review: in an age where it seems to be accepted that ronald reagan won the cold war against the evil and godless commies, it was wonderful to see such an openminded history. walker tells it like it is, regardless of what the american establishment would want you to think. which isn't at all to say that this book glorifies the ussr... stalin's purges and gulag are given due space, as are the atrocities of eastern europe. but walker does not shy away from dean acheson and john dulles's dishonest exaggerations of the soviet threat, reagan's illegal wars and democracy-toppling, the stupidity and moral hypocricy of vietnam, and the strongly political machinations behind the scenes in washington. walker has done his research, and his arguments are fact-based through and through. the only person who really comes out seeming good is mikhail gorbachev, although even he was eventually phased out by his own revolution. definitely worth looking into, especially if you want to be able to understand the cold war objectively.
Rating:
Summary: amazing!
Review: in an age where it seems to be accepted that ronald reagan won the cold war against the evil and godless commies, it was wonderful to see such an openminded history. walker tells it like it is, regardless of what the american establishment would want you to think. which isn't at all to say that this book glorifies the ussr... stalin's purges and gulag are given due space, as are the atrocities of eastern europe. but walker does not shy away from dean acheson and john dulles's dishonest exaggerations of the soviet threat, reagan's illegal wars and democracy-toppling, the stupidity and moral hypocricy of vietnam, and the strongly political machinations behind the scenes in washington. walker has done his research, and his arguments are fact-based through and through. the only person who really comes out seeming good is mikhail gorbachev, although even he was eventually phased out by his own revolution. definitely worth looking into, especially if you want to be able to understand the cold war objectively.
Rating:
Summary: A well-distributed overview
Review: It's always risky buying books off the shelf, especially on controversial subjects like the Cold War. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised by Martin Walker's history of that vexed period. He strives for a balanced and non-partisan approach, and succeeds admirably. This is no small accomplishment, given the kinds of pressures, commercial and ideological, to cast the contest as one pitting the Free World (us) against the Evil Empire (them). Wisely, Walker avoids such reductionist thinking. Basically, the contest that emerges is between two very complex empires, each striving for domination of the other. And if the West emerges victorious as it did, it's not because of any inherent moral superiority, but because its institutions ultimately proved more efficient at producing both guns and butter. Astutely, Walker avoids divisive moral comparisons, since to do so would entail endless rounds of which side commited the greater atrocities, about which there is considerable blame on both sides. Highlighting the book is the little gem of a chapter on the Cuban missile crisis, a dramatic account that once again shows why war is too important to be left to the generals. If the book has a fault, it's the occasional absence of tissues to connect events from one chapter to the next. Thus important threads sometimes dangle. This is probably unavoidable for a relatively brief account that covers such a densely packed 50 year time period. Thus Walker's book emerges as an excellent short history of those events that shaped the lives of so many of us.
Rating: 
Summary: Revisionist history is not history
Review: The Cold War: A History is an exercise in deceptive marketing. This is revisionist history. Biased, slanted and laden with omissions. The Soviet Union - which murdered millions of its citizens - is presented as a bland protagonist that ultimately found its way through Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev and, if Marxist Leninism had only been given a fair chance, would have become the Worker's Paradise its progandists had proclaimed in 1917.
Walker's disdain for the United States could not be clearer. The United States is the penultimate source of all evil in the world. The Soviet repression of its own citizens and those in its satellites and foreign clients are essentially ignored or glossed over.
Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush are pilloried along party lines - and I don't mean the Democratic or Republican parties. Rather Reagan is evaluated by the criteria of European, primarily French, intellectuals who really haven't accomplished much of practical value over the past few centuries.
This is a cruel book because it supresses the truth while proclaiming itself to be truthful. I pity those people who read this so-called history and feel enlightened, for they will be the very people who allow the tragedies and horrors concealed by Walker to happen again. Jerry
Rating:
Summary: Good book, poor finish.
Review: This book is a good overview of the cold war, and covers the major events, often drawing on hard-to-find sources. It's also pretty balanced, not conservative, and not terribly liberal. I almost stopped reading when Walker drew a weak parallel between the resistance to racial integration in the American South to the Soviet massacre of 3,000 innocent Hungarians in 1956, but this was the only abomination before the last chapter of the book, so I continued. (HOW can a person compare American police using riot-tactics to Soviet tank crews mopping Hungarian-puree off their tank treads?) However, in the final chapter, Walker unfairly criticizes America as having won the Cold War, but having more in common with the USSR than her European allies. For example, Walker dared to compare the 100-some executions of convicted criminals in America to the millions of innocents and dissidents murdered by Communist repression. So, up to the last chapter, this is an excellent book, but it tapers off dramatically.
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