Cold War Book Critique
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This study will provide a book report on Thomas G. Paterson's On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War. Paterson is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut, and the author and editor of twelve other books. He is the recipient of Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and has been the president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The current work is a revised edition of a 1979 work, including an updating of events which transpired after that year, most notably the opening of Soviet society in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union which resulted in the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Paterson writes that he has been able to take advantage of a decade of research for his revision, learning from international perspectives based upon declassified documents in other nations. The promising . . . opening of the Soviet record and the freer expression Soviet historians began to enjoy in the late 1980s permitted me to study afresh Soviet foreign policy (Paterson xi). Paterson is eminently qualified to write such a book, and he has made effective use of the materials unavailable when he wrote his original work. This book puts the Cold War, its background, its development, and its demise, into clear and concise historical perspective. As the author notes, in order to understand the end of the Cold War, it is first necessary to understand its
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n which would mark American-Soviet relations to the end of the Cold War.
Nevertheless, Paterson argues that there were signs as early as 1950, and intermittently after that time, that each side wanted to move "haltingly toward easing the Cold War" (Paterson 222). Conferences and treaties were arranged. Soviet President Gorbachev made bold moves from the Soviet side in the 1980s, forced by social and economic reform needs to ease tensions with the United States. Finally, in 1991, the Soviet Union "came apart" and "the Cold War seemed over once and for all" (Paterson 225).
This book is a good choice to learn about the Cold War because it is provides a clear, chronological and concise account of the causes for the conflict and the reasons it came to an end. Paterson's work is also useful because the author does not offer an overly optimistic outlook: "Little is immutable in world affairs, and successes are often short-lived" (Paterson 231). The end of the Cold War certainly appears to be beneficial to mankind, but the long-term effects have yet to be determined.
Work Cited
Paterson, Thomas G. On Every Front. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
This study will provide a book report on Michael Mandelbaum's The Nuclear Revolution: I
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Approximate Word count = 2005
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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