The harshest peace.

Being a child of the '80s, my personal perceptions of the Cold War consists of mostly stock images and quotes: duck and cover drills in schools, Spam-stocked bomb shelters, ICBMs paraded through Red Square, JFK's 'Berliner' moment, and always, always the image of a mushroom cloud looming on the horizon.

Of course, the intricacies of the Cold War go well beyond a few points in time. John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, has completed several hefty tomes on the subject. Fortunately for those of us who aren't well-versed in diplomatic history, Gaddis has provided an approachable yet thorough introduction to the period in The Cold War: A New History, published in 2005. Writing over a decade after the fall of the USSR, there's never any question in Gaddis' text whose decisions would prove decisive. Gaddis' theories aren't going to break a great deal of new ground: still, even those who are well-versed in the events of the day will appreciate Gaddis' ability to explain clearly the motives of both sides in spite of the tangled geopolitics of the time.

Since The Cold War serves as an introductory text, Gaddis did sacrifice details of events and personalities for the sake of theories and grand strategies. Those looking for a detailed description of the Cuban Missile Crisis or Reagan's words to Gorbachev at Reykjavik won't find either here. But in a war that was just as much about battles that didn't happen, Gaddis' work is indespensible in understanding why events played out as they did.