Cold War: For Forty-Five Years the World Held Its Breath

The story of the half-century since the end of World War II

This history's framework is the confrontation, military and ideological, between two great powers that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of crises and conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague, to spies, student riots, and encounters in space. Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing record epic history through the detail of individual human experience: the recollections not only of statesmen whose decisions led to these momentous events, but also of the ordinary men and women whose lives were bound up in these years of conflict. This is the first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from the recent opening of Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives as well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving narrative that it both gripping and informative, the true story of the Cold War can at last be told.