The Cold War: A Military History (Black 2015)

Jeremy Black skillfully deploys his considerable expertise in military and diplomatic history and presents a concise narrative that demonstrates the complexity and global nature of the Cold War. This is a history of the superpower conflict and the crises that engulfed the Third World. From Black's emphasis on the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War and the root causes of the ideological and geopolitical conflict of U.S. and U.S.S.R. to détente and proxy wars and to his argument about the fall of the Soviet Union as the result of a crisis of totalitarianism, this book is international history at its best. [Ingo Trauschweizer]