Book Description
The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.
Customer Reviews:
History in Context.......2007-09-07
I found this book to be an extremely well organized survey of the Cold War. Professor Gaddis eloquently explains the sources of the conflict. He goes on to describe the escalation; and then points out how, somewhere in the middle, many of its actors came to view the conflict as permanent, and even desirable. He explains how it took men and women of vision to see the landscape of the future without the conflict as a permanent fixture, and then relentlessly pursue that vision.
The inclusion of the Soviet perspective from recently available sources makes this book especially interesting. The Soviets were pursuing global communism, which proved to be an unworkable solution to the ills of unbridled capitalism. But, we may never have had such crystal clear historical evidence of its unworkability if the Soviets hadn't undertaken their experiment.
Was the Cold War really dangerous?.......2007-07-17
The year Ronald Reagan died my mom commented to me, "What is all the fuss about Reagan? What did he ever do?" After I wiped the blood from my eyes, I asked her, "You don't speak Russian do you? If nothing else, you can thank him and men like him for that." People tend to forget what a formidable foe the USSR was and how close they came to winning the Cold War. Todays youth have even made the old Russian flag a fashion statement, wearing it on tee-shirts hoping to gain cool points from their hip socialist brainwashed friends. But the fact of the matter is that the Russian Empire was a threat. John Gaddis does an excellent job reminding us of this fact. Although the book is not an in depth study of the cold war, it is useful as a reminder to subsequent generations that the Communist threat was real, in American and throughout the rest of the world.
an excellent concise resource.......2007-06-30
Gaddis has done an excellent job of telling an extremely complicated history in a tight and well-written volume. The importance of his story is contrasted by his reminding the reader that his college students today have almost no living memory of the Cold War or just how serious a historical epic it was between two great powers.
As the world has changed dramatically over the past 16 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, this book will be an excellent resource to remember just what a huge struggle the Western bloc vs. the Soviet Union and its satellites was. This is not an ideaological book from the Yale professor Gaddis, but he gives credit to the end of the Cold War to three individuals and a people group: Ronald Reagan, Margeret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and the people of eastern Europe who contiually stood up to the Soviet and local communist leaders.
A weak point of this book, which admittedly does not have time to explore the vast and complicated expressions of every part of the Cold War is Gaddis explanation for why the anti-war movements of the 1960's and 70's in the West erupted with as much fury as they did, and subsided almost as quickly. His explanation, that it was largely caused by baby boom young adults, coming of age, with lots of time on their hands seems like a short answer. Comparing and contrasting the reaction of the West to the Korean War vs. Vietnam might have made a better use of the text.
Gaddis presentation of how the Cold War started at the end of World War II is another excellent section, especially how the West, making practical concessions to the Soviets that they could never hope to bargain for at the end of the war, quickly turned European opinion against the Soviets by forcing the Soviets into the position of being the ones who built wall, established border police and shut themselves off because they had to keep people in.
The explanation of proxy conflicts, especially in the Middle East, is another highlight of the work. Seeing the Israeli and Palestinian conflict as rump to the Cold War, and the Soviets inability to deal with their Egyptian allies in Nasser further showed the weakness of the Soviet state.
While ultimatley Gaddis presents the end of the Cold War as being led by the four main actors mentioned earlier, his treatment of Gorbachev as a man who managed the end of the failure of the Soviet Empire and the inability of the Soviets to have a sustainable economic future - the very reason for its existence is told with great clarity.
Gaddis warns throughout the book that choosing an ends justifying the means approach got the West into more dificulty than anything else. The attempt by the West, especially between John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, to manage a stable world delayed the inevitable end of the Cold War and more than likely created greater human misery of the likes the world has rarely scene. Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher and John Paul, were in a sense revolutionaries, for they sought to win the Cold War by calling for total peace and not half measures of agreements and stability.
Very Good, Concise History.......2007-05-21
This is ideal if you're not looking for an 14,000 page account of the Cold War...you get a little background on everything, from nuclear tests to Cuba to the fall of the USSR. What you don't get is much detail, which, I suppose, is the intent of a concise history; a little more detail would have been nice, though. It's a 260 page book, a few more facts or stories here and there probably wouldn't have pushed this into "only for historians" territory, it's hard to complain about the brevity of a book whose aim is brevity. 'The Company' by Robert Littel goes well with this, as it fleshes out many of the major events here in a far less dry manner than most Cold War history books. Anybody looking for an overview of one of the largest, longest, most epic events in modern history should pick this up.
Recounting the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union.......2007-04-19
One of the great debates in American foreign policy is how do you deal with repressive regimes. There are several schools of thought on how to proceed. The first is isolation (this has been the U.S. policy towards Iran and N. Korea). The second is confrontation (Iraq is the obvious example) and the third is communication (this would be the tactic used by Nixon in China and the policy of détente with the Soviet Union). Each policy has its advocates and detractors and each its plusses and minuses. Embracing China has worked out fairly well for its citizenry although there is much room for improvement. On the other hand supporting the Saudi monarchy has caused some serious headaches for the U.S. and Saudi citizens. Isolation and sanctions have a very poor track record and generally makes repressed citizenry even worse off. Confrontation can have unpredictable results that often exasperate the situation. Military confrontation can lead to considerable misery and verbal confrontation generally fails because one of the maxims of maintaining a dictatorship is demonstrating strength. The Bush administrations threats towards Iran and North Korea have fallen flat.
The ethos of `do no harm' fails when deciding how to deal with stable but brutal dictatorships or failing regimes. I was watching Hotel Rwanda with my girlfriend when she asked why the United Nations hadn't done more to protect the Tutsis from genocide. But what could the U.N. do? Slaughter the Hutus? The Tutsis had blood on their own hands. In the case of Bosnia the U.N. and U.S. bombed the hell out of the Serbians but again the Albanians were no angels and had in fact sided with the Axis during WWII. While trying to arrest Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid 18 American soldiers died but so did an estimated 1,000 and 1,500 Somali militiamen with an upwards of 4,000 injured Somali. So when does a humanitarian mission become a slaughter?
In the case of the Soviet Union the people were clearly suffering under a crushingly repressive dictatorship. Despite its claim to being a system of the working man, Communism was an intellectual farce and an economic disaster. It was also a system bent on spreading its message and extending its influence. So the debate in the West was between confrontation and isolation. In the end a compromise of sorts was formed ending in confrontation through proxies. The author gave several examples of countries playing the two superpowers off one another. By not explicitly siding with one or the other smaller countries could manipulate for their own benefit or "wag the dog".
`The Cold War' by John Lewis Gaddis is rather brief for a subject spanning over 40 years of history. The author spends a considerable amount of time discussing the changing nature of war after the invention of the atomic bomb. We all owe a debt of gratitude to leaders on both sides of the iron curtain for showing the wisdom and restraint to not use these horrifying weapons. `The Cold War' chronicles the history of the Soviet Union from Stalin to Yeltzin. In the Soviet Union there was no position high enough that one could be free from danger of removal. There will always be a debate on whether containment was the best solution or whether it was Reagan's confrontation that was the final nail in the coffin. The author clearly favors the style Reagan and Thatcher and pretty much omits the sections on U.S. meddling in South America and the Middle East in the name of containment. Reagan's refusal to use the nonworking SDI as a bargaining chip seems silly in retrospect but it was on his watch that the Soviet Union collapsed and since the world wasn't irradiated I figure he must have done SOMETHING right.
Book Description
At a year-end publishers' party at the zenith of the roaring 1990s, the editor of a "laddie" men's magazine asked his newest staff writer to pitch him the wildest, most over-the-top idea for an adventure travel piece that he could think of. "You name it, we'll do it!," the editor promised. Remembering his childhood fascination with the Kazakh S.S.R. and its description in National Geographic as "the most remote place on earth," Ted Rall proposed a reckless headlong plunge into the belly of post-Soviet Central Asia. "I'll drive the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul," Rall said, "via Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. I won't do research. I'll just show up and see what happens."
Five years after having been cut loose by the imploding Soviet Union the Central Asian republics—colloquially known as the Stans—were reeling from an identity crisis precipitated by economic collapse. Citizens of a great superpower woke up to find themselves in Third World anarchy. Closed societies were opening up for the first time. Guards at the Chinese-Kazakh border detained Rall for hours at one checkpoint after another; they still faxed Moscow for advice on how to handle him. They had never seen an American passport.
What began as a lark yielded a stunning series of revelations. Elderly people were starving to death in nations sitting atop the world's largest untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Looters were cavalierly ambling around in flatbed trucks loaded with disinterred nuclear missiles. Statues of and slogans by crazy dictators were springing up as quickly as their corrupt military policemen could rob a passing motorist. And on the main drag in the capital city of each of these profoundly dysfunctional societies, a gleaming American embassy whose staff was quietly calling the shots in a new campaign to de-Russify access to those staggering energy resources.
CIA agents, oilmen and prostitutes mixed uneasily and awkwardly in ad hoc British-style pubs where beers cost a dollar—a day's pay and more than enough to keep out the locals. In an extreme case of the "oil curse," wealth was being pillaged by U.S.-backed autocrats while their subjects plunged into poverty. Meanwhile Taliban-trained Islamic radicals were waiting to fill the vacuum.
It was a volatile mix. But did anybody care?
Rall's magazine account of his 1997 misadventures through Central Asia, "Silk Road to Ruin," was soon followed by a feature he launched on his Los Angeles radio talk show. "Stan Watch: Breaking News from Central Asia," was intended as a send-up of Americans' disinterest in foreign affairs. Again, the joke turned serious. "Stan Watch"'s obscure news stories about the world's most remote countries, which many Americans couldn't even pronounce, became wildly popular. NPR and the BBC simulcast it. A 1999 assassination attempt on Uzbek president Islam Karimov became a subject of intense speculation. Americans, it turned out, were interested in the outside world. They just couldn't read about it in their local newspaper.
Soon, no one knew more about Central Asia than Rall.
Transformed by what he saw being done in America's name and eager to sound the alarm, he became an expert. He returned to visit the region's most rural mountain villages. He brought two dozen ordinary Americans on the bus tour from hell. He went as a rogue independent and as a guest of the State Department. He returned to cover the American invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, then went back again. Capitals moved, street names changed and the economic fortunes of entire nations turned on a dime from year to the next, but those changes merely reinforced Rall's firm belief that Central Asia is the new Middle East: thrilling, terrifying, simultaneously hopeful and bleak, a battleground for proxy war and endless chaos. It is the ultimate tectonic, cultural and political collision zone. Far away from television cameras and Western reporters, Central Asia is poised to spawn some of the new century's worst nightmares.
Customer Reviews:
FASCINATING!!.......2007-09-29
Ted Rall travels to Central Asia - Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. He traveled a few times by himself while he was doing a radio show in LA. Then he went on behalf of the U.S. state government to Turkmenistan and on his own to Afghanistan via Tajikistan to cover the 2001 Afghan invasion.
The book goes into the history, current political situation and culture of this region of the world which we do not know much about. We read about a world where there are military checkpoints, not much development, corruption and different cultures. We learn that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have vast amounts of untapped oil reserves which the United States, Russia and China are all vying to get. Since 2001, the U.S. has also opened military bases in these countries.
He details environmental problems such as Kazakhstan is Russia's Nevada and Russia does nuclear testing there. He goes into Central Asia's versions of 9/11 and Tiananmen square. Also we learn about some customs and interesting games played by people in Central Asia. The book has some enlightening and funny comic strips in it. Rall has a genuine appreciation of the history and culture of these regions.
Rall's conclusion at the end is that when democratically elected leaders such as Askar Akayev from Kyrgyzstan are toppled by U.S. backed revolutions and dictators who bow to the U.S. are instilled; this will lead to a repeat of a 1979 Iranian style revolution in these countries. That is one conclusion, the other one is that countries are turning a blind eye to gross human rights violations like murders of political opponents or boiling dissidents while at the same time cozying up to dictators to gain favor and eventually access to oil. This will create resentment in the long term. He says if people in the United States don't care about these countries, that is fine, as long as we withdraw from the region completely. Another conclusion is that foreign aid is pouring into Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan since they have proven oil reserves. Meanwhile Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are borderline failed states. Rall states these countries are a "package deal" and if one or two countries remain volatile, it will affect neighboring countries. Silk Road to Ruin is a must read book to learn about this underreported part of the world.
Reveals American Contempt for Central Asians.......2007-09-05
Ted Rall's book is worth reading, for a damning self-portrait of an "ugly American" version 2006--huckster, radio host, cartoonist, coldly cynical, thrill-seeking, slumming Ivy Leaguer, brimming with smug condescension and contempt for those he encounters on various tours through Central Asia over the past decade.
Rall waltzes through some of the most violent and tragic regions on earth apparently in search of laffs, thrills, and chills. He gets them. A form of 21st century slumming, adventure tourism is the theme, including a brief kidnapping by the Taliban. Yet lives of ordinary Central Asians apparently matter little--he boasts of paying thousands of dollars in bribes to bump Central Asians from reserved seats on an airplane in order to escape with his tour group from a potentially violent attack. Despite claiming that the Central Asians were in no danger (if so, why were they leaving, and why had they bought tickets?), his message is clear: "I'm number one."
Although Rall clearly has talent as a writer and cartoonist, as well as determination and guts, he apparently lacks human compassion for the people in the region he exploits in his business ventures.
One word: JUNK.......2007-06-07
Ted Rall offers his usual ultra left-wing bias in this work. It is hard to read through such a book when the author cannot be trusted to give an objective opinion.
Dictators and Diarrhea.......2007-03-02
This book is a winner for both armchair travelers and those with a serious interest in international geopolitics. Intrepid journalist Ted Rall has become an expert on the obscure lands of Central Asia. This vast but little-covered area covers the five former Soviet republics known collectively as the "Stans," plus parts of Afghanistan and non-Chinese far-western China, all of which are strongly integrated in culture and history. Here Rall reports, with both journalistic insight and a brutally engaging writing style, about his extensive trips through the region. In an often rip-roaring read, we learn about the various horrors of traveling in Central Asia (the corruption and diarrhea there are both among the worst on Earth), while also gaining knowledge on the region's complex politics and infighting. Rall also provides enjoyable coverage of some of the region's offbeat personalities, locations, and culture - such as Turkmenistan's incompetent dictator Turkmenbashi, or a bizarre sport called buzkashi in which many meatheads die painfully for fun and glory.
Central Asia will soon be a world quagmire that will make the Middle East look like a hissy fit. Age-old ethnic tensions, corrupt dictators, irredentist meddling, and the hangover from Russian and Soviet brutalization will all soon combine with the worst of energy politics, as Central Asia's immense fossil fuel resources attract money and influence from power players. Ted Rall usefully clarifies what's really happening in Central Asia from the ground, and points out the geopolitical disaster that will occur if we merely view the region through the lenses of terrorism (i.e. everyone who disagrees with America is in league with Al Qaeda) or petropolitics (i.e. nations are given benefits or sanctions based merely on how much fossil fuel they can offer). Overall, this book is held back a bit by Rall's occasional tendencies toward hyperbole. His political points become repetitive as the book rumbles along, and the later chapters on energy and military matters get bogged down in simplistic conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, Rall's graphic novellas about his journeys add a great amount of fun to this book, but his regular four-panel political cartoons just aren't really that enlightening. Finally, the book is very richly illustrated, especially with candid photos of Central Asia's regular folks - but the maps are cramped and incomprehensible, which is a real problem if you like to see the precise locations of all the interesting places Rall talks about. [~doomsdayer520~] ]
Ted Rall is one smart cookie!.......2007-02-12
Ted Rall is best known to me for his inciteful and incendiary cartoons. I had no idea he is also an intrepid traveller and perceptive and wildly funny observer of human behavior. What a great, funny,interesting and depressing book.
Book Description
Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.
To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The "cool medium" permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed -- and ultimately welcomed -- his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings.
By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.
Customer Reviews:
Superior Socio-Cultural History.......2006-05-22
The author should take a bow. He has written a wonderfully balanced, anecdotal-rich account of the simultaneous evolution of the Cold War, TV and political culture in the Age of McCarthy (which is, in all too many ways, an age we are still in.) That the junior senator from the cheeshead state was a craven opportunist is as well known now as it was even then, but what he exploited via the new electronic medium was the pervasive fear that subversion lurked behind every vacuum tube as well as behind every State Department desk.
Terrific.......2004-05-18
Cold War, Cool Medium is a terrific and compulsively readable study of McCarthyism in the context of the early history of television. Doherty astutely establishes the way televison worked in its formative days. Then he shows how its weaknesses aided in the rise of McCarthy and how both its strengths and weaknesses aided in his fall. Superb and easiy to read history.
Book Description
In September 1946, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Nikolai Novikov, sent a 19-page cable to Foreign Minister Molotov describing the likely direction of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar period. Recently discovered in the Soviet archives, the Novikov telegram parallels the famous "Long Telegram" of U.S. diplomat George Kennan. Published here for the first time in English, Novikov's telegram is presented alongside Kennan's cable and a similar telegram by British diplomat Frank Roberts.
Customer Reviews:
The Limits of Diplomatic Reporting.......2007-05-16
This interesting but limited book reprints three diplomatic cables from 1946 that analyzed the collapse of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance of World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War: George Kennan's famous "long telegram" from Moscow; a cable from Soviet Ambassador Novikov in Washington; and a cable sent by the British charge in Moscow. Unlike most diplomatic reports, these cables dealt with huge questions of policy and were read by top officials of the home governments. They underscore how differently London, Washington and Moscow saw the world.
The British analysis was the most nuanced and non-apocalyptic; it still instructs and reads well in 2007. In contrast, Kennan's report was surprisingly shallow, even though it had a big impact in Washington; it came close to reducing Soviet foreign policy to neurotic anxiety, as if Moscow had no legitimate interest in secure borders. The analysis sent by the Soviet embassy was a curious document, mixing paranoia about American military preparations with shrewd observations of global politics. None of the cables displayed a deep understanding of the inner workings of the host government. Each served mainly to reinforce inclinations already prevalent in foreign policy circles back home.
Connoisseurs of diplomatic reporting will enjoy this book, but there's little reason for others to bother with it. The short commentaries do not -- contrary to the title -- add up to a history of the origins of the Cold War, though they do serve as good examples of how historians analyze documents. For specialists only.
Book Description
Missing for two hundred millennia, the legendary Iconians have returned, bringing with them the secret of interdimensional teleportation across vast interstellar distances. Awakened once more, their ancient Gateways are rewriting the map of the galaxy, and nowhere more than in the New Frontier®....
A century ago, the imperial Thallonians separated two feuding alien races, depositing each of them on a new world safely distant from that of their ancestral enemies. Now, however, the Gateways have made it possible for the long dormant blood feud to begin anew. Captain Mackenzie Calhoun of the U.S.S. Excalibur and his partner, Captain Elizabeth Shelby of the U.S.S. Trident, find themselves fighting a losing battle to keep the horrific violence from escalating, even as they gradually realize the catastrophic danger posed by the Gateways themselves!
Download Description
Missing for two hundred millennia, the legendary Iconians have returned, bringing with them the secret of interdimensional teleportation across vast interstellar distances. Awakened once more, their ancient Gateways are rewriting the map of the galaxy, and nowhere more than in the New Frontier®.... A century ago, the imperial Thallonians separated two feuding alien races, depositing each of them on a new world safely distant from that of their ancestral enemies. Now, however, the Gateways have made it possible for the long dormant blood feud to begin anew. Captain Mackenzie Calhoun of the U.S.S. Excalibur and his partner, Captain Elizabeth Shelby of the U.S.S. Trident, find themselves fighting a losing battle to keep the horrific violence from escalating, even as they gradually realize the catastrophic danger posed by the Gateways themselves!
Customer Reviews:
Not His Best Effort.......2007-05-28
I generally enjoy all of the Peter David's Star Trek books I have read, but this one was very boring to me. The story was not that interesting. Usually I cannot put his books down, but this one was almost tough to finish.
Not the Greatest... Not the Worst.......2004-06-22
I must admit this was my first foray into Peter David's New Frontier, and while Peter David seems a great writer, I'm not a fan.
The story here was good and riveting as well the character development for M'Ress especially was great. As for the Gateways series I recommend TNG's book instead of this one, as this one doesn't have much to do with the real problem. The only relation to the Gateways problem in fact, is the fact that it is a gateway that has restarted a war between two races. This book simply serves as a "Hey, here's another reason gateways are bad."
My major issue with NF is that I don't like the fact that Calhoun and crew are "silly" and very much NOT what you have come to expect of a Starfleet crew and captain. Shelby is about the only believable recurring character here. Calhoun is not professional and boldly goes against what the Federation is and the admirals know it. The fact that he is still a captain after all of his shenanigans is a miracle. I think the New Frontier series was created simply to have the Star Trek name on it. Peter David is a good enough writer that he could have written his sci-fi books with out Star Trek and they'd have been better.
Best of Gateway Series.......2002-06-09
This was the best of the 5 I've read. Like many New Frontier books, this one ends in a cliffhanger, but the story just prior to that point has a conclusion that you can feel is complete in itself.
Peter David is probably the most consistently entertaining ST author, but this was a challenge for him. I think dealing with two New Frontier crews is difficult. He pulls it off, but not as much fun, in my opinion, as some of the earlier New Frontier books. The two separate Captain--First Officer relationships just don't have the flame of Calhoun and Shelby. And Shelby isn't her same old self either. That can be good, as the future will tell, but so far I was slightly disappointed in that aspect.
Still, the book by David is the best I've seen of the Gateway series.
Great Trek story.......2002-01-13
Like many reviewers have mentioned here before it is a story of two races that hate each other and were separated long ago by the Thallonians. They sent them to two different worlds with no spaceflight technology. Since this is a Gateway series you know they get their hands on it and attack each other. The Excaliber and Trident commanded by Calhouhn and Shelby are sent to solve the Gateway problem and the war between these races.
The story is very typical New Frontier style with interesting twists and attitude. I did noticed the NF gang is mellowing and growing up more except for the engineering crew with that Fetus joke. Thatcould have been cut down a little. Overall I thought the story was great and to me the best of the series tied with the TNG story. The series started so-so, dropped to pretty bad in the 2nd but from that point on was good to excellent.
Read it. Just read it........2001-12-18
I'm gonna need another bang in the eye for dismissing Peter David's New Frontier world before I read this book. Admittedly, there are holes because I didn't read a few NF installments, but those holes didn't diminish my understanding or enjoyment of this book. A few details missed? Yeah. But in the Big Picture, I was still able to put it all together. The holes just make me want to go back and read the NF books I missed, so how could that be a bad thing?
In this, novel, Peter expertly guides his "irreverently-professional" bunch through a rousing adventure involving both ancient technology and ancient enemies.
Take two vicious enemies and put them on separate planets to keep them away from one another. Introduce technology (those dratted gateways) that enables them to get to each other in the blink of an eye and boom Big Trouble in Thallonian space.
Enter Mac Calhoun on the *Excalibur* and his wife, Elizabeth Shelby, on the *Trident,* charged by Starfleet with keeping the peace.
What follows is "peacekeeping" quite unlike what you might expect from, say, Jean-Luc Picard. Take, for example, this excerpt, written here to give you an idea of the reigning attitude throughout:
"Calhoun was standing in the open area within the desk, and Si Cwan was next to him. The Counselars had made it clear that they would not convene nor speak with him at all unless he stayed in the 'Place of Address,' which was where he was standing at that moment. Calhoun did not particularly want to be in the Place of Address. Just then, he'd have far preferred to be in the Place of Beating the Crap out of the Counselars, had such a location actually existed."
I ask you, can you beat this?
While this novel stands alone just fine, it *ends* with a gateway cliffhanger, same as all the rest of them do, to be taken up in the final novel in this series, "What Lay Beyond."
But for real? Read this puppy. And read all the other Gateway novels while you're at it.
Book Description
In recent years, the question of the post-Cold War NATO, particularly in relation to the former communist countries of Europe, has been at the heart of a series of international reform debates. NATO in the “New Europe” contributes to these debates by arguing that, contrary to conventional assumptions about the role of international security organizations, NATO has been systematically involved in the process of building liberal democracy in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
The book also seeks to contribute to the development of an international political sociology of socialization. It draws on arguments developed by political theorists, sociologists, and social psychologists to examine the dynamics and implications of socialization practices conducted by an international institution.
Customer Reviews:
Suprising view of NATO as an Instrument of Democracy.......2005-10-23
At the end of the Cold War the newly free contries that had been satelite states of the Soviet Union were faced with a problem. The only people with experience in running the country were the communists, who were not considered politically reliable, or former dissidents who may have been reliable but had no experience in leading the country.
Surprisingly, the author reports, the road to these contries adopting Western-style liberal democratic norms and institutions turned out that working with NATO has been far more influential than what would have been expected from a normal expectation of a military alliance.
NATO was involved primarily in establishing the legal and institutional arrangements in the area of Defense. This inturned helped shape definitions of appropriate liberal democratic identity in those states.
The book spends most of its time on the Czech Republic, Romania and of course in analyzing NATO from various international relationship areas.
The conclusions reached by the author are particularily interesting when compared with the viewpoint of the normal liberal to military organizations.
Book Description
This volume includes a number of case studies from the post-Cold War era and condenses the lessons learned from them into "do's" and "don'ts" in the exercise of U.S. power.
Average customer rating:
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British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (International Communications)
John Jenks
Manufacturer: Edinburgh University Press
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Book Description
This is a study of the British state's generation, suppression and manipulation of news to further foreign policy goals during the early Cold War. Bribing editors, blackballing "unreliable" journalists, creating instant media experts through provision of carefully edited "inside information", and exploiting the global media system to plant propaganda -- disguised as news -- around the world: these were all methods used by the British to try to convince the international public of Soviet deceit and criminality and thus gain support for anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad.
Britain's shaky international position heightened the importance of propaganda. The Soviets and Americans were investing heavily in propaganda to win the "hearts and minds" of the world and substitute for increasingly unthinkable nuclear war. The British exploited and enhanced their media power and propaganda expertise to keep up with the superpowers and preserve their own global influence at a time when British economic, political and military power was sharply declining. This activity directly influenced domestic media relations, as officials used British media to launder foreign-bound propaganda and to create the desired images of British "public opinion" for foreign audiences.
By the early 1950s censorship waned but covert propaganda had become addictive. The endless tension of the Cold War normalized what had previously been abnormal state involvement in the media, and led it to use similar tools against Egyptian nationalists, Irish republicans and British leftists. Much more recently, official manipulation of news about Iraq indicates that a behind-the-scenes examination of state propaganda's earlier days is highly relevant.
John Jenks draws heavily on recently declassified archival material for this book, especially files of the Foreign Office's anti-Communist Information Research Department (IRD) propaganda agency, and the papers of key media organisations, journalists, politicians and officials. Readers will therefore gain a greater understanding of the depth of the state's power with the media at a time when concerns about propaganda and media manipulation are once again at the fore.
Book Description
The Nuclear Borderlands explores the sociocultural fallout of twentieth-century America's premier technoscientific project--the atomic bomb. Joseph Masco offers the first anthropological study of the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project for the people that live in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb, and the majority of weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, were designed. Masco examines how diverse groups--weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, neighboring Pueblo Indian Nations and Nuevomexicano communities, and antinuclear activists--have engaged the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post-Cold War period, mobilizing to debate and redefine what constitutes "national security."
In a pathbreaking ethnographic analysis, Masco argues that the U.S. focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on American society. The atomic bomb, he demonstrates, is not just the engine of American technoscientific modernity; it has produced a new cognitive orientation toward everyday life, provoking cross-cultural experiences of what Masco calls a "nuclear uncanny." Revealing how the bomb has reconfigured concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship, the book provides new theoretical perspectives on the origin and logic of U.S. national security culture. The Nuclear Borderlands ultimately assesses the efforts of the nuclear security state to reinvent itself in a post-Cold War world, and in so doing exposes the nuclear logic supporting the twenty-first-century U.S. war on terrorism.
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Rethinking America's Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order (American Assembly Series)
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0393030598 |
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