Cold War is the story of the half-century since the end of the Second World War
- the story of our lives. Its framework is the confrontation military & ideological between two great powers that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of crises & conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade & the Cuban Missile Crisis to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw Budapest & Prague to spies student riots & encounters in space. In Cold War Jeremy Isaacs & 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 & women whose lives were bound up in these years of conflict. Cold War is the first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from the recent opening of Soviet East European & Chinese archives as well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving narrative that it both gripping & informative the true story of the Cold War can at last be told.