100 Books Like The Cold War's Killing Fields

This book is a treasury of significant but unknown historical information. Even if you are well-read on the Cold War, the global perspective which the book gives will change what you think you know.

Structuring his argument chronologically and thematically, O. Westad makes the most comprehensive case for the Cold War’s impact on the Global South. I learned more about the modern history of Africa and East Asia and their subsequent decolonization and state-building than in any other book.

I also appreciated how the author does not take an ideological stance for the USA or the USSR but allows the readers to explore the political argumentation that arose in decisive historical moments.

Countless books have been written about America’s war in Vietnam, but I suggest you start with Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War.

This Pulitzer Prize winner reads like an epic novel, winding the reader through the years leading up to Washington’s fateful military commitment to Vietnam with remarkable empathy for all involved. Logevall is a talented historian, whose mastery of the field and extensive use of untapped sources keeps pace with his beautiful writing style. You won’t want to put this one down.

At long last, Jeremy Friedman has given us a cogent, succinct book about Sino-Soviet competition for the Third World.

Readers need not have any deep background in the topic to make sense of Friedman’s work, which lays out a clear explanation of how the Soviet Union’s quest for anti-capitalist revolution butted up against China’s pursuit of anti-imperialism. Shadow Cold War argues that the Sino-Soviet rivalry was rooted in ideological competition, adding another “revolutionary paradigm” to those detailed in Odd Arne Westad’s Total Cold War.

Fanon is one of my heroes.

He was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, political activist, philosopher, and a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front involved in the fight against French colonialism. He sadly died following a short illness when he was just 36 years old. He wrote two seminal books that had a profound effect on my understanding of the psychological impact of discrimination and colonisation on both the coloniser and the colonised.

I found his writing to have a visceral quality, and having come from a colonised country (Iraq) to live in the coloniser country (Britain), I could "feel" in my body and mind the psychodramas he was describing.

For a long time, studies of the Comintern focused on the political organization itself. Brigitte Studer’s work focuses on developing a cultural history of the organization, focusing on what she calls the “Cominternians,” the various communists who worked in the apparatus. Here, she uses a variety of lenses, from Moscow as a transnational hub, to the role of gender, to the impact of the Stalinist terror on these members. By also focusing on a wide array of experiences, she showcases the hope many Cominternians had, but also the betrayal they experienced as Stalinism changed the movement in the 1930s. Partially responsible for the transnational turn in Comintern studies, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to know more about the organization. 

For readers who are interested in learning how to think about international relations, strategy, security, and history.

The collection of essays discusses US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and the Cold War. My favorite is Trachtenberg’s critical reassessment of the origins of the First World War, a destructive conflict no one wanted to happen but still walked into.

I always assign this book to my students.

The author presents a reasoned rational explanation of historical events: Agents act rationally from self-interest. History makes sense.

As I read the book, I was challenged to ask: how rational is human behavior? What does rationality mean in a world that we hardly understand because it is fraught with uncertainty?

Uncertainty and surprise are important in history: What will be the next revolutionary invention? Who will be the next charismatic leader? What new ideology will sweep away conventions? Does history really make sense? Can we really make rational decisions when we face deep uncertainty about the world?

Assigned to students at every American war college, this book offers a chronological and thorough examination of changing strategic thought over the last 500 years. It describes important theorists and ideas, how these developed over time, and how they shaped the planning and conduct of modern warfare. Most importantly, it underlines the relationships among different strategic theorists and how their ideas influenced one another. 

Every book this author produces feels like a magnum opus. In this latest tour de force, Freedman surveys decades of history across several continents to shed light on the deeply intertwined relationship between the development of military strategy and the politics of command.

Thanks to this vast scope, the case studies in this book provide portraits of a wonderfully eclectic cast of characters, demonstrating how civilian leaders and military officials battled over authority, autonomy, and resources in a wide range of contexts.

Dupuy & Dupuy’s Encyclopedia of Military History is the historical bedrock of strategic studies. Despite its name, it is not so much an encyclopedia, as a readable chronological account of world history. It is integrated with insightful commentary on technology, tactics, leadership, and society, presented at the beginning of each chapter, and within sections dedicated to specific battles and wars. Although Wikipedia now exceeds it in the detail of the events and the background of the conflicts covered, Wikipedia lacks a roadmap or the careful examination of the cumulative historical changes that underpin warfare. I assign this fourteen hundred-page text as the primary text in my introduction to strategic studies course.