What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
David Talbot · 704 pages
"An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful and secretive colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on
George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis · 814 pages
A remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman · 896 pages
Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Ukraine, Taubman (political science, Amherst College) writes a thorough biography of one of the most complex and important political figures of the 20th century whose life and career spanned revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, the Cold War, Stalinism, and post-Stalinism. Includes two sections of good
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
Robert Dallek · 752 pages
With the publication of his magisterial biography of John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek cemented his reputation as one of the greatest historians of our time. Now, in this epic joint biography, he offers a provocative, groundbreaking portrait of a pair of outsize leaders whose unlikely partnership dominated the world stage and changed the course of history.More than thirty years af
Diplomacy
Henry Kissinger · 912 pages
In this controversial and monumental book - arguably his most important - Henry Kissinger illuminates just what diplomacy is. Moving from a sweeping overview of his own interpretation of history to personal accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Kissinger describes the ways in which the art of diplomacy and the balance of power have created the world we live in, and shows how Americans,
Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America
Chris Matthews · 400 pages
One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Tim Weiner · 376 pages
Draws on recently declassified documents to chronicle one of the most disastrous presidencies in U.S. history, presenting a portrait of a brilliant man overcome by his deep insecurities and his distrust of his cabinet, Congress, and the American people. Here is the first history of President Richard Nixon covering all of his secret tapes and documents, many declassified in the past two years. Awa
American Scoundrel
Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
A co-author of “American Prometheus” chronicles the life and work of the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn. Read by Ari Fliakos. 15 hours, 42 minutes unabridged.
Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission
Bret Baier · 346 pages
January 1961: President Eisenhower has three days to secure the nation's future before his young successor, John F. Kennedy, takes power -- a final mission by the legendary leader who planned D-Day and guided America through the darkening Cold War. Those three days were the culmination of a lifetime of service that took Ike from rural Kansas to West Point, to the battlefields of World War II, and
Berlin 1961
Frederick Kempe · 640 pages
Based on a new documents and interviews, this work is a look at the Berlin Crisis of 1961, with powerful applications for the present. In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called it "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War, and more pe
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas · 853 pages
A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces six close friends who shaped the role their country would play in the dangerous years following World War II. They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos and leave a legacy that dominates American policy to
K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist
Peter Carlson · 327 pages
K Blows Top is the hilarious true story of a stranger in a strange land. The stranger was Nikita Khrushchev, the fat-bellied, thin-skinned, funny, cranky premier of the Soviet Union. The strange land was America in the 50s, a world of tail fins, movie stars, missile silos, and duck-and-cover drills. Khrushchev's bizarre 1959 trip across America was, as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it, "a sur
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman--from World War to Cold War
Michael Dobbs · 418 pages
An account of the pivotal six-month period spanning the end of World War II, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the Cold War.
The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and The Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom
Blaine Harden · 304 pages
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. · 1,087 pages
Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy
Ted Widmer · 320 pages
A uniquely unscripted, insider account of Kennedy and his cabinet grappling with the day-to-day business of the White House and guiding the nation through a hazardous era of uncertainty. Features extensively annotated transcripts of the recordings and a foreword by Caroline Kennedy.
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Odd Arne Westad · 498 pages
The Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States indelibly shaped the world we live in today -- especially international politics, economics, and military affairs. This volume shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the 20th century created the foundations for most of today's key international conflicts, including the "war on terror." Odd Arne Westad examines the origi
The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union
Serhii Plokhy · 489 pages
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan · 741 pages
"The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the
Armageddon Averted : Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000
Stephen Kotkin · 280 pages
"In the Cold War era that dominated the second half of the twentieth century, nobody envisaged that the collapse of the Soviet Union would come from within, still less that it would happen meekly, without global conflagration. In this compact book Stephen Kotkin shows that the Soviet collapse resulted not from military competition but, ironically, from the dynamism of Communist ideology, the long-
Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die
Garrett M. Graff · 529 pages
"The eye-opening truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil--even if the rest of us die--a roadmap that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today"--Provided by publisher.
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg · 505 pages
In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers-a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam-to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent