Reddit reviews The Cold War: A New History

The entire point of the Great Leap Forward was to accelerate the transformation of China from an agricultural society to an industrialized one. By doing so, the Great Leap Forward probably resulted in more human misery in one fell swoop than any other event in history, outside of wars.

Mao Zedong was a Marxist communist. According to Marx, all societies were destined to evolve from agricultural to industrial, and from the industrialized society would rise the proletariat -- the inevitably oppressed working class would revolt and bring to bear the communist socialist state.

This had arguably happened in Russia, and Mao wanted the same for China. But China was still mostly agricultural -- there was no proletariat to rise up! He determined to accelerate the inevitable march of history, and thereby hasten the rise of the socialist and classless society in his country, by compelling it to transform into an industrialized one.

So how did he do this?

From John Lewis Gaddis' phenomenal book "The Cold War",

>"[Mao] ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, and throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements – and produce steel. The result of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever."

It was bad. Really bad. So yes, you could make the case that Mao tried accelerate a Chinese industrial revolution. He did so haphazardly at the expense of tens of millions of lives.

I understand there are plenty of sources which support Reagan's contribution to the cold war, though I do feel that article isn't particularly exhaustive. In any case though, I appreciate the response and source.

Here are two books which I found helpful during my Polisci program, and which contributed part of the background on my position on Reagan.

Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938, 9th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005).

Some from my shelf

Arsenals of Folly

The Cold War

On China

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

NATO's Return to Europe

On War

Bonus: The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

I'm really into the late Roman Republic, naval history (especially the period between the US Civil War and the First World War, and the Second World War), and Russian history, especially the late Romanov/early Soviet era and the Cold War. Book recommendations:

• Naval history. Just take a look here and go nuts. :P
  
  
• Roman Republic. This may sound strange, but my favorite books about the late Republic aren't actually history books, they're the Masters of Rome series of novels by Colleen McCollough. They're really only semi-fictional, in that they take real events, real people, and the society they lived in, and fill in the gaps of what we don't know with (very plausible, well-written, and exhaustively researched) fictional narratives. The First Man in Rome is the first, and still my favorite out of all of them.
  
  
• Russia. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy (Russian Revolution, Civil War/War Communism, and early Soviet era). John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History. Both really great.

It mentions it on the Origins of the Cold War wiki page:

> The Soviets believed at the time, and charged throughout the Cold War, that the British and Americans intentionally delayed the opening of a second front against Germany in order to intervene only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe.

I recommend checking out (if you haven't already) John Lewis Gaddis, specifically The Cold War: A New History. Gaddis is probably the preeminent Cold War historian of our time.

The go-to book is "The Cold War - A New History" by John Gaddis. http://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1/183-6028618-5185812

"The Gulag Archipeligo" by Solzhenitsyn is also excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Abridged-Investigation/dp/0061253804/ref=cm_lmf_tit_20/183-6028618-5185812

"Truman" by McCullogh has some nice insight into the early years of the Cold War: http://www.amazon.com/Truman-David-McCullough/dp/0671869205/ref=cm_lmf_tit_26/183-6028618-5185812

• Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Wiener. Chapter and verse how a small cadre of adventuresome elitists ended up shaping the post-War world into what it is today.
  
  
• The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. A balanced look at the effects upon the world of the economic systems of capitalism and communism, and an analysis of how the Soviet loss of the Cold War does not mean an American win.
  
  
• Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia by Bertil Linter. As much a socioeconomic history of the Pacific Rim as a flashy expose of Triads, the Yakuza and the Tongs, Blood Brothers delves into the philosophy of crime in Asia and how the Western paradigm of Law/Crime is inadequate when describing the Eastern mindset of quasi-governmental organized "crime."
  
  
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Discusses the overall impact of mankind on ecology, geology, and the future of the planet, whether or not we happen to be here.
  
  
• The Joke by Milan Kundera. A lyrical, heartbreaking look into the workings of Soviet Czechoslovakia. The allegations that Milan Kundera may have been an informant himself throws a stark and surreal light on the book.
  
  
• The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski. Starting with the fork and working his way through the paperclip, Petroski illustrates that the oft-repeated platitude "necessity is the mother of invention" is completely wrong - luxury is the mother of invention.
  
  
• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Oversimplified and infuriating, Ishmael is, however, a pretty good overview told in a semi-entertaining way of Conrad Lorenz's argument that the modern lifestyle is fucking stupid and we were all better off as hunter-gatherers. If condescending sophistry isn't your bag, go to The Source.
  
  
• Watchmen. Fer real.