Cold War on Five Continents - by Alfred W McCoy (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A provocative analysis of the deadly conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington.

Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable wastelands, surrogate wars in 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 a new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern world history.

McCoy offers an intimate portrait of covert operatives and young antiwar protesters, humanizing the history of the Cold War--a history that has too often been told in terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.

By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust, McCoy offers important lessons for a younger generation facing climate change even as the great powers devote humanity's scarce resources to a "new cold war."

Review Quotes

Praise for To Govern the Globe:

"An ambitious effort to discern patterns in the rise and fall of world empires.... McCoy's account is compelling...with many provocative observations on world history and its present twists." --Kirkus

"To Govern the Globe is a brilliant distillation of 700 years of geopolitics, exposing how we arrived where we are, amidst the worsening climate crisis and collapsing world orders. Al McCoy's eloquently written book is a call to action for us all, as time still remains to prevent an unprecedented cascade of catastrophes."
--Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!

"McCoy is one of the most eminent scholars in the world on the abuse of power and authority, on surveillance and repression, on the historical evolution of state-sanctioned torture in the US and elsewhere, and, more recently, on the rapidly declining state of the US empire."
--Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist and author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars

"To Govern the Globe ... offers a kaleidoscopic and timely analysis of the present US decline, contextualizing it among a succession of empires and world orders across the past millennium." --Counterpunch

"In an age where most scholars concentrate on a limited specialty, no one sees a bigger picture more brilliantly than Alfred McCoy. In this powerful, enlightening, and frightening book he gives us a magisterial view of the empires of the past--and of the force in our future which promises to dwarf them all."
--Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

"To Govern the Globe is history on an epic scale--sweeping, provocative, and unsparing in its judgments. Alfred McCoy's immensely readable narrative spans centuries, charting the rise and fall of successive world orders down to our own present moment shaped by China's emergence as a great power and the blight of climate change."
--Andrew Bacevich, author of After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed

About the Author

Alfred W. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Politics of Heroin, the classic study of global drug trafficking that the CIA attempted to suppress. Among his two dozen published books, the most recent are In the Shadows of the American Century and To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.