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Title: One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (The Global Century Series) by David Reynolds, J. R. McNeill ISBN: 0-393-32108-8 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (6 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: well done book marred by bias
Comment: Admirable in its goal and ambitious in its scope, David Reynolds' One World Divisible offers a truly global history of world events since 1945. Overall, it is a decent summary of the period (if 700 pages can be termed a summary) and could easily and confidently be used as a textbook for almost any modern history course, either as the central text or as a complement (I read it in class focusing on the Cold War). It touches on events in all parts of the world and also on social, economic, political, cultural, and technological trends. Reynolds does a particularly good job of chronicling the years of revolution 1989-1991, when so much was happening in so many different places.
However, for all its utility and detail, Reynolds' political opinions appear far too often--enough that it detracts from the book. Certain words and phrases (such as family values) receive the scornful, mocking quotation marks that academics often use. The tobacco industry is attacked. The American gun lobby is also criticized, and their positions result from a "selective reading of the Second Amendment." The Reagan administration, among other things, is termed "fanatically antigreen." "Many" senior Republicans who sought to impeach Clinton were also adulterers. Samuel Huntington is reduced to an opponent of multiculturalism. Margaret Thatcher responded to the Falklands crisis not only with resolution but also "relish." Vietnam protesters were "dignified."
I am also not quite convinced that his linking of various fundamentalisms (the American Christian Right with Islamic fundamentalists, for example) is appropriate or accurate. And his paean to series editor Paul Kennedy was a bit overdone. Beyond the political bias and some minor flaws of analysis, the book functions fairly well at least as a timeline and also as a generally cohesive picture of the past 50 years.
Rating: 2
Summary: A Leftist Look at the Last 55 Years
Comment: Yes, writing a global history is an impossible task. However, there are varying degrees to which you can succeed. David Reynolds comes up short with his book titled "One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945".
Reynolds' main theme is that, while advances in telecommunications have made communication easier and faster to all points of the globe, the world is not converging into a monocultural monster. Reynolds' believes quite the opposite is happening. Mass communication and increased education have aided the fragmentation of empires like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and France. The western European withdrawal from empire and the collapse of totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe have created many new states and allowed the rising consciousness of formerly suppressed ethnic identities.
Reynolds supports his thesis well but, aside from a few disgruntled French farmers, anyone with the requisite intelligence to even read a book such as this already knows it. Reynolds portrays his theme as if it were reinventing contemporary conceptions of the world when in fact all he is doing is reinforcing what any educated person already knows.
Regarding the actual history that Reynolds writes, he does well up until about 1980. The closer he gets to the year 2000, the more Reynolds gets wrong. He seems to have a particularly difficult time explaining the American scene since roughly the Ford administration. Two egregious mistakes he makes are blaming America's deficits on the Reagan tax cuts and claiming that Clinton was impeached for his sexual improprieties. What caused the large deficits of the 1980s was not Reagan's tax cuts but his inability to reign in (or his indifference to) excessive Congressional spending. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was impeached for having committed perjury and suborning others to do so too. I doubt the leaders of the impeachment push would have gone after Clinton for infidelity considering most of them were guilty of that same character flaw thereby making themselves obvious targets of public ridicule.
At least Reynolds does acknowledge that his interpretation is open to discussion. He has the sense to know that any history of such a recent period will not be definitively written for some years to come and it likely won't be beholden to this one.
Rating: 5
Summary: Simply great
Comment: It is hard to believe but this breakthrough is a tangible reality. Full of in-deapth research, it covers a wide range of fledging issues in a humourous style. I enjoyed reading it.
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Title: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History by John Lewis Gaddis ISBN: 0198780710 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1991 by Don Oberdorfer ISBN: 0801859220 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Power and Protest : Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente by Jeremi Suri ISBN: 0674010310 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (The New Cold War History) by Matthew J. Ouimet ISBN: 0807854115 Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Mao's China and the Cold War by Jian Chen, Chen Jian ISBN: 0807849324 Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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