Rating: 
Summary: Booring with serious omissions
Review: This overview of the cold war suffers from serious omissions. First, Walker neglects to describe some of the darker aspects of the cold war such as the crimes and atrocities associated with both Soviet and US backed puppet dictators. In particular, he never discusses how the US overthrew democratically elected governments in Latin America and replaced them with brutal dictatorships friendly to American businesses...Guatamala especially comes to mind. The oppression of Eastern Europe as it came under Soviet domination under Stalin also deserves more attention. Second...little is written concerning the numerous conflicts related to the cold war in Africa and Mid East such as in Angola and Ethiopia. The role of China in the cold war could also have been discussed and analysed in more detail. Instead, the author goes into a long tedious discourse on the disruption of the world monetary and economic systems due to the Cold War arms build-up and other related policies. Thus besides failing to discuss important topics the author takes an exciting and intriguing subject and presents it in a booring and tedious manner.
Rating:
Summary: Not un-biased
Review: Unlike most other reviewers, I find this to be highly biased. This is not a military history of the Cold War, and a more appropriate title would be "An economic history of the Cold War Era", as the author devotes the majority of space to discussions on economic impacts.
Like most other reviewers, I find this book omits highly significant events during the Cold War.
Some examples of the events the author omits, yet are still firmly entrenched in the whole Cold War era:
The author barely acknowledges the Korean War, yet this event has a book-end effect. It was the first major armed conflict of the Cold War, and the DMZ is the last functional relic of the Cold War.
The author presents the Soviet Union as a misunderstood child who's troubles are all to blame on the USA. The author even applauds the Soviet response to the Chernobyl disaster, and makes a side note of the fact that the Soviet Union, for several days, explicitly denied that any event occured. An historical comparison of both nuclear disasters, Chernobyl versus Three Mile Island, might shed more light on the issues involved during the entire Cold War period.
Near the end of the book, the author seems to find a comparison between the USA's penal system to the Stalin era Gulag.
As a final concrete point of bias, the last several pages refer to "the untimely deaths of (Nelson) Mandela and (Yasser) Arafat". What is the point of such a statement? These figures were still alive at the time of publication; or is the author using these fictional events to paint possibilities? For whatever reason the author makes this statement, it adds no value to the book, and lessens the content due to sensationalism.
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