Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections / Edition 2

by Adam B. Ulam

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765808851
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	12/31/2001
Edition description:	Expanded
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

Adam B. Ulam (1922-2000) taught at Harvard University from 1947 until his retirement in 1992. He was Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, and twice director of the Russian Research Center. He was the author of 19 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: The Kirov Affair.

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and center associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. His books include Political Pilgrims, The Many Faces of Socialism, and Soviet and American Society: A Comparison.

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

Nielsen, who wrote The Big Foundations in 1972, here updates his study of America's 36 largest organized philanthropies. Although the project was funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation, the author has succeeded in remaining objective, for his chapter on the feuding within that organization is the liveliest in the book. Overall, however, his examination of foundations with assets in excess of $250 million is bland; for example, he plays down the much-publicized criticism that the McGeorge Bundy regime caused fiscal damage to the Ford Foundation. Nielsen does fault all these organizations for inattention to problems of war and peace, to the decreasing productivity of U.S. industry and to an ``underperforming'' U.S. welfare state. Still, his report is unlikely to garner a wide audience. November 26

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Golden Donors tells the stories of the nation's 36 largest private foundations, which have a vast influence on private philanthropy in the United States. For each foundation, an account of the donor's life (and personality), the foundation's management, and the development of its philosophies and program is given. A section on the MacArthur Foundation, one of America's newest and largest, is replete with tales of the founder's eccentricities and infighting among the board of directors. Incidentally, the MacArthur Foundation provided a grant to the author for the writing of Golden Donors. Nielsen's wide-open approach makes these inside stories interesting reading for those with some knowledge of private foundations and philanthropy in the United States. Sybil B. McShane, Dept. of Libraries, Montpelier, Vt.

Library Journal