Cold War Books

Our great and enduring shame is that we read books. If you’re interested in reading some of the books we are using as our source materials, here’s a list we recommend.

  • Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire – Fredrik Logevall
  • Ho Chi Minh – William J. Duiker
  • The Marshall Plan – Benn Steil
  • America’s Cold War: The Politics Of Insecurity – Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall
  • The Tragedy of American Diplomacy – William Appleman Williams
  • Atomic Cover-Up – Greg Mitchell
  • The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb – Gar Alperovitz
  • Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.) – Tim Weiner
  • The Manhattan Project  – Al Cimino
  • The Truman Era – I. F. Stone
  • Truman – David McCullough
  • Potsdam – Michael Neiberg
  • Operation Paperclip – Annie Jacobsen
  • The Second World War – Winston S. Churchill
  • Yalta: The Price of Peace – S. M. Plokhy
  • Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics – V. M. Molotov
  • Kissinger’s Shadow – Greg Grandin
  • World Order – Henry Kissinger
  • Conversations with Stalin – Milovan Djilas
  • Fidel Castro: My Life – Ignacio Ramonet
  • Che – Jon Lee Anderson
  • The War State – Michael Swanson
  • My Silent War – Philby, Kim
  • Economic Causes of War By Peter T. Leckie
  • Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin – Timothy Synder
  • American Diplomacy – George F. Kennan
  • A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
  • Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – John Perkins
  • For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War – Melvyn P. Leffler
  • The Yalta Conference – Charles River Editors
  • World War II Documents: The Yalta Conference – Various Authors
  • The Devil’s Chessboard – David Talbot
  • Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator – Oleg V. Khlevniuk
  • A History of Modern Russia – Robert Service
  • FDR – Jean Edward Smith
  • Alliance – Fenby, Jonathan
  • Churchill’s Empire – Richard Toye
  • The Soviet Century – Moshe Lewin
  • Young Stalin – Simon Sebag Montefiore
  • Cold War – Carole K. Fink
  • Debating the Origins of the Cold War – Ralph B. Levering
  • A Failed Empire – Vladislav M. Zubok
  • The Cold War – John Gaddis
  • Donovan: America’s Master Spy – William Stephenson
  • The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman – Harry S. Truman, Robert H. Ferrell
  • A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 – Michael J. Hogan
  • Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman – Merle Miller
  • Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 – Stephen Kotkin
  • The hidden history of the Korean War, 1950-1951 – I. F. Stone
  • Untold History Of The United States – Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick
  • Tito: a biography – Geoffrey Swain
  • Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era – Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, Peter Stanfield
  • Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution – Noam Chomsky, Davor Džalto
  • Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated – Gore Vidal
  • Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933 – James E. Pool, III, Suzanne Pool
  • The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship – Paul R. Gregory, Norman Naimark
  • The Invention of the Land of Israel – Shlomo Sand
  • The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World – Daniel Yergin
  • The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy – Adam Tooze
  • Masters of Deceit – J. Edgar Hoover
  • Little ’Red Scares’: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946 – Robert Justin Goldstein