Description
By (author) McCoy Alfred W.
:
A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington
Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history.
McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.
As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise- ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.
Table of contents:
Chapter 1: The Cold War’s Long Shadow
Part One: Struggle Over Europe and Its Colonial Empires
Chapter 2: USA vs. USSR
Chapter 3: Europe—Cockpit of Conflict
Chapter 4: Fighting Communism in Southeast Asia
Chapter 5: War in Korea
Chapter 6: End of Empire in the Middle East
Chapter 7: Covert Action in the Caribbean
Chapter 8: Cold War Comes to Africa
Part Two: One, Two, Many Vietnams
Chapter 9: The Vietnam War
Chapter 10: Jakarta Is Coming
Chapter 11: CIA Coup in Chile
Part Three: Surrogate Wars in the Third World
Chapter 12: Struggle for Southern Africa
Chapter 13: Civil Wars in Central America
Chapter 14: Afghanistan’s Imperial Graveyard
Part Four: Close of the Cold War
Chapter 15: Collapse of the Soviet Empire
Chapter 16: Toward a New Cold War
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Men on the Spot, Cold War, 1946–1991
Review quote:
“Cold War on Five Continents is the culmination of a lifetime of research, analysis and writing that began in the early 1970s when the author wrote, The Politics of Heroin, which the CIA tried and failed to kill. In an age like ours when publishers, editors and reporters bow down before the authorities and authority, Alfred McCoy proves he’s once again an American journalist who has mapped the road that the cold warriors have paved with the blood and the bones of humanity and who shows us where we need to go now to survive.” —CounterPunch
“Alfred W. McCoy continues his indispensable role as a guide through the shadow side of U.S. empire. His most recent book, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage, should force us to rethink the postwar period, a sweeping, magisterial, and humane vision of how superpower rivalry was fundamentally a covert op and a psych war, and, in a way, a prelude to our current state of confusion. A tour de force. “
—Greg Grandin, author, America, América: A New History of the New World
“A masterful account of conflict of every sort in almost every imaginable place. Alfred McCoy”s history of the Cold War is a must-read.” —John Dower
“Sweeping, vivid, and provocative, Alfred McCoy has proven once again that few are his match when it comes to taking a probing, wide-angled lens to the troubles of our time. Cold War on Five Continents manages to span the globe and half a dozen decades, peopling that history with lively figures and showing the larger patterns their rol
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