The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev and the Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race - Hardcover

E. Hoffman, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184831230X ISBN 13: 9781848312302

Publisher: Icon Books, 2011

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
The Dead Hand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative history of Reagan, Gorbachev and the final decade of the Cold War. Washington Post journalist David E. Hoffman draws on exclusive interviews in both Russia and the US, as well as classified documents from deep inside the Kremlin, piecing together the first full – and intensely dramatic – account of how the US/Soviet arms race came to a close, and revealing the previously unheralded collection of scientists, soldiers, diplomats and spies that made it happen.

About this title

Review:

'A stunning feat of research and narrative. Terrifying.' Author: John le Carré

'Authoritative and chilling ... a readable, many-tentacled account of the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union ... The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy - Dr. Strangelove as updated by the Coen Brothers.' Author: New York Times

''The Dead Hand' is a brilliant work of history, a richly detailed, gripping tale that takes us inside the Cold War arms race as no other book has...a story so riveting and scary that you feel like you are reading a fictional thriller.' Author: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'

'An extraordinary achievement.' Author: Sir Michael Dobbs

'This is a tour de force of investigative history.' Author: Steve Coll

'A thought-provoking book which reads like a thriller. A gripping chronicle of the second half of the last century and a brilliant analysis of the single strategic conflict that more than any other shaped today’s world.' Author: Gordon Thomas, author of 'Inside British Intelligence and Gideon’s Spies'

'I found 'The Dead Hand' extremely stimulating. As a Foreign Office Minister I was involved in Gorbachev’s meeting with Margaret Thatcher; and as Defence Secretary from 1992-95 I was very much associated with the safe removal of post-Soviet states’ nuclear weapons. This book is an excellent history of that period.' Author: Sir Malcolm Rifkind, MP

'This book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and is soon to be published in the UK, is in the best traditions of American long-form reportage... Key characters are evoked in enough detail to make us care and then carry the narrative through to the end. It involves simplifications and elisions: but in this case, these are less important than the horrified fascination Hoffman – a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, later foreign editor – succeeds in rousing through a story at once journalistically detailed and morally alive.' Author: John Lloyd, FT

'Hoffman's magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time doesn't stop in 1991.' Author: Peter Preston, Guardian

'[Hoffman] has compiled a fascinating narrative of the last phase of the cold war and the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika, which ended amid the collapse of the Soviet Union.' Author: Max Hastings, Sunday Times

From the Author:

David Hoffman is a contributing editor at the Washington Post, where he previously served as White House correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and assistant managing editor for foreign news.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 184831230X
• ISBN 13: 9781848312302
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 576