Cold War : An International History ISBN: 9780813347967 Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Westview Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time Subjects: History; Geography/ Travel;
The long duel between the U.S. and the Soviet Union emerges in a broad context in this insightful history of the Cold War. Fink (The Genoa Conference), professor emerita of history at the Ohio State University, grounds the book in a perspicacious review of Soviet international relations from 1917 onwards and a deft analysis of how wrangling over the fate of Germany and Eastern Europe during and after WWII laid the foundations for the coming rivalry. Her brisk narrative surveys important flashpoints of the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift through the 1989 collapse of Soviet communism, and delineates its underlying shape as direct confrontation between Americans, Russians, and Chinese in Europe, Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam gave way to wary policies of coexistence and detente. She shows how the antagonism, while easing somewhat, also took on a life of its own as it subsumed quarrels between Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, or Guatemalan landlords and peasants; local conflicts the world over, she notes, entangled almost against their will two superpowers "still trapped by Cold War reflexes to seek advantage wherever possible." Fink's crisp, lucid prose and judicious, even-handed assessments impart a coherent arc to complex events; students especially will find this an invaluable introduction to a watershed era of modern history. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Carole K. Fink is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at The Ohio State University.nbsp; She is an award-winning author, editor, and translator of 12 books, including Defending the Rights of Others,nbsp;The Genoa Conference, and Marc Bloch: A Life in History, and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, most recently from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, the German Marshall Fund, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Fulbright Foundation.
