What I'm Reading Right Now (11 AM PDT)

I started the morning reading Miss Marjoribanks (Margaret Oliphant, published 1863), moved quickly through Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (Frederick Lewis Allen, first published 1931), to arrive about an hour ago where I am now.

I’m currently reading The Cold War: A New History (©2005), by John Lewis Gaddis, who is The Authority on the Cold War and has written six other books on the subject.

His primary audience for this new book is the young folks for whom the Cold War was never “current events,” those for whom it’s “not all that different from the Peloponnesian War.”

It is also useful for those of us who remember all too vividly the Cuban Missile Crisis and backyard bomb shelters. Few of us fully understand how the war began, how it ended, and how close we came to mutual assured destruction.

This is Wilhelm’s book and he rates it highly. He went through it like a hot knife through butter, and this is a serious book with 266 pages of text and 70 pages of notes and sources. Read it.