Understanding the Cold War
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Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections

Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections


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About the Book

Understanding the Cold War is the story of a man and an epoch. Its telling moves between detailed personal history and an Olympian assessment of the origins, significant events, and outcome of the Cold War. Professor Ulam describes his hometown, family, and early education, as well as his departure, with his brother, for the U.S. just days before the Nazi invasion of Poland would have trapped them. Then follows reminiscences of his college and Harvard years, all rich with anecdote and insight, and his thoughts as an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs. The volume offers basic antidotes to simplistic explanations. Whether discussing the Kirov assassination or the Moscow Trials of the so-called Trotskyist Bloc, or the nationalist basis of disputes between China and Russia during the Vietnam War period, Ulam avoids the sensational and the speculative in favor of the the empirical and the evidentiary. The core segments of the work review the Cold War from the belly of the Stalinist and later post-Stalinist communist system. And in a section entitled "The Beginning of the End," Ulam discusses the Gorbachev interregnum and the early years of the transition from communism to democracy. He well appreciates how the ease of the transition does not betoken a simple movement to the democratic camp. In contemplating the changing nature of the new political configuration, one could hardly have a better guide to clarity and authenticity than Adam Ulam. Reviewing Understanding the Cold War, Stephen Kotkin, director of Princeton's Russian Studies Program, observed "...And whereas some celebrated analysts, such as John Maynard Keynes, had dismissed Marxism as 'illogical and dull,' Ulam highlighted the doctrine's intricacy and comprehensiveness, which, he argued, explained its attraction not just to peasants, but also to intellectuals."

Table of Contents:
One: Farewell to Poland; 1: The Ulams’ Lwów; 2: The Last Summer; 3: Pre-War Poland: An Assessment; Two: A Polish Youth in a New Land; 4: The New Country; A New Life; 5: War Years; 6: A Fugitive Stays with Józef Ulam: George Volsky’s Tale; 7: Echoes of the Holocaust; Three: The Professor; 8: Early Harvard Years; 9: A Young Instructor; 10: Implications of the Cold War; 11: On Being an “Expert”; 12: Lenin; 13: Turbulent Foreign Relations; 14: Vietnam; 15: The Fall of the American University; 16: The Tyrant’s Shadow; 17: Stalin; 18: The Surprising 70s; 19: Mystery Novels & The Kirov Affair; 20: The Curse of the Bomb; 21: Back to the Past with Revolutionary Fervor; 22: The Communist World; 23: Novel Uncertainties; 24: Poland: A Determined and Non-Violent Resistance; 25: Stan; 26: Travels Abroad; 27: Gorbachev and the Beginning of the End; 28: To the Bialowiezha Forest; 29: Russia Again; Four: Postlude; 30: Other Thoughts and Memories; 31: Ending; 32: Adam and His Friends; 33: Review of Adam Ulam’s Professional Career; 34: Notes on Lwów; 35: A Letter from John Kenneth Galbraith

About the Author :
Adam B. Ulam (1922-2000) taught at Harvard University from 1947 until his retirement in 1992. He was Professor Emeritus and Gurney Professor of History and Political Science. He was the author of many books, including Prophets and Conspirators in pre-Revolutionary Russia (published by Transaction), Stalin: The Man and His Era, Lenin and the Bolsheviks, The Unfinished Revolution, Philosophical Foundations of English Socialism, and a political novel on The Kirov Affair. Paul Hollander is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a long-standing colleague of Ulam at the Russian Studies Center at Harvard University.

Review :
-There is really only one legitimate measure of an autobiography, and that is its ability to bring the author to life for the reader, giving a sense of who the person was and what it must have been like to have known him or her. On that score, Adam Ulam's [Understand the Cold War] succeed on every level. To spend time with this book is to spend time with Adam himself. ... Adam Ulam's autobiography stands on its own, giving a clear picture of both the man and his career and displaying his analytical prowess and pe4rsonal charm in abundance.- --Thomas P. M. Barnett, Project Muse "There is really only one legitimate measure of an autobiography, and that is its ability to bring the author to life for the reader, giving a sense of who the person was and what it must have been like to have known him or her. On that score, Adam Ulam's [Understand the Cold War] succeed on every level. To spend time with this book is to spend time with Adam himself. ... Adam Ulam's autobiography stands on its own, giving a clear picture of both the man and his career and displaying his analytical prowess and pe4rsonal charm in abundance." --Thomas P. M. Barnett, Project Muse "There is really only one legitimate measure of an autobiography, and that is its ability to bring the author to life for the reader, giving a sense of who the person was and what it must have been like to have known him or her. On that score, Adam Ulam's [Understand the Cold War] succeed on every level. To spend time with this book is to spend time with Adam himself. ... Adam Ulam's autobiography stands on its own, giving a clear picture of both the man and his career and displaying his analytical prowess and pe4rsonal charm in abundance." --Thomas P. M. Barnett, Project Muse


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780765808851
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Sub Title: A Historian's Personal Reflections
  • Width: 152 mm
  • ISBN-10: 0765808854
  • Publisher Date: 31 Dec 2001
  • Height: 229 mm
  • No of Pages: 432
  • Weight: 680 gr


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