During these anxiety inducing times – Trump’s continued fascism and the world wide rise of nationalism, I turned to the study of history. I find it reassuring to see that humanity has survived, even thrived, through worse periods of time. With Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, I have to wonder if the U.S. and Russia are headed back into a cold war, assuming the first one really ended. Maybe I’m interested in how a continent can recover from a fascist leader who ran roughshod over his country. Whatever the impetus, I’ve become interested in cold war European history. In between the reviews that I owe publishers, I’ve started digging into history. The following three books are first up on my reading list.

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

From the publisher:

The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own.

Gaddis is also the author of On Grand Strategy.

I’m about 100 pages into this book, and it’s wonderful. Gaddis has the ability to make a survey of the history compelling. He plays the U.S. and the Soviet decision makers against each other; instead of chess players, he makes them seem like normal individuals. The writing is quotable and well researched. Based on this, I went out and bought his other book, On Grand Strategy.

Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

From the publisher:

A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II

Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it.

In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective.

A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience.

A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

Moving from a survey of the decades after World War II to a survey of the year following the war makes sense. In the little I’ve read of it so far, this book zooms in closer on the people of 1945.

Postwar

by Tony Judt

From the publisher:

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award

One of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year

Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world’s most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

This award winning book focuses specifically on Europe. It comes highly recommended from the history buffs that I know.

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Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of these books.