A sequel to A Foreign Country, I was gripped for the first half of this standard spy fare of trying to identify a mole in the service. Once the mole is identified however, it’s just a case of catching him in the act. From then on, there is no need for the reader to do much thinking for herself as everything we need to know is very carefully explained, surveillance is described in minute detail, and the twists are predictable. I’ll admit to skim reading towards the end because I was bored.

Fourthly, and more to the point of the book's premise, I agree with 95% of Marin Katusa's premise, assessment, and warning. His energy, financial, and foreign policy arguments are VERY WELL researched and explained and very compelling. He has put his finger on the pulse of our future and found it to be weak and thready under our current economic/political condition.

I absolutely loved Westad's previous academic book, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, so I read this one on the strength of that. Why did the Cold War end when it did? Few questions have generated more heated debate over the course of the last three decades. Archie Brown, one of the foremost experts on the subject, shows why the popular view that Western economic and military strength left the Soviet Union with no alternative but to admit defeat is erroneous. We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. This is an ambitious work by the preeminent historian of the Global Cold War. Westad certainly touches on most of the countries that were affected by the Cold War, but his acceptance of the Cold War as a useful trope to evaluate the entire world is flawed. Indeed, Westad is one of the historians who has shown that the Cold War was anything but "cold." It was actually comprised of many "hot" wars. Portraying the conflict between the US and USSR as "cold" delegitimizes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and portrays them as pawns in a bigger game by white, European and American powers. Book Genre: Business, Cultural, Economics, Finance, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, Politics, Russia

Over the past few years, I have followed the odd stories on Rosneft, Gazprom, Ukraine, Georgia etc. This book does a comprehensive job in joining the dots highlighting an undeniable and cogent rationale behind Russian involvement in all what I have read thus far. Westad tries to show that these smaller, less powerful countries had some impact on the US and USSR, but often paints the situation in a manner where one of the superpowers acted and the less powerful country reacted. There is a brief chapter on Latin America in which Westad shows that the people in those countries had some agency, but he rarely gives agency to any players outside of the Non-Aligned Movement, led by India. Further, Westad never touches on the people in the "third world" (another trope that delegitimizes people who do not live in Europe or the US) countries outside of the governmental figures. The reader is left wondering what the lives of the citizens in the "third world" countries was like. Other historians have shown that many of them did not care one way or another for communism, capitalism, the USSR, or the US, yet Westad does not examine this at all. The Cold War and the superpowers wars through proxies fascinate me. How the hell did we all survive. At any stage either side could’ve just said “to hell with it”! And pushed the big red “launch” button.

The American Ryan character was a 5 star product developed by Cumming. Kell was made into the far more typical 44 year old projection. A man, quite easily I thought, after a 2 decade left behind and flat marriage- prime for the exact kind of harvest that Rachel combined. Almost instantly. And so Tom is made quite easily into a trembling reed. For the status of the job he now holds again? That was hard for me to swallow. But at the same time, has a high probability ratio.

From a Bancroft Prize-winning scholar, a new global history of the Cold War and its ongoing impact around the world In the Bloomberg interview Katusa revealed he manages a Canadian Hedge Fund; he’s involved in shale oil, copper and uranium; so his money in “on the line”. Westad says the seeds of the Cold War were planted much earlier, in the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, when Western nations competed to accumulate colonies in India, Africa, and Asia, China suffered repeated interventions by the West and Japan, and Russia and the United States began to assume greater international prominence.A enjoyable and well constructed spy thriller from Charles Cumming with the story and action nicely paced but never too fast or loose to make it unbelievable. Due to the immense amount of material, he can't quite get as detailed in his characterization as a more tightly focused work such as Tuchman's excellent Guns of August, and by the nature of how the conflict actually played out, it does end more with a whimper than a bang, but there's enough detail and color to make each chapter compelling, and indeed I found it a book that was very difficult to put down. But once I grasped the entity of Istanbul and Odessa and each ferry etc- I couldn't put the book down. And it was NOT only because of all the excellent "tailing" episodes of 10 or 12 or 15 character inputs, either. The author wanted to make a pathbreaking claim about something which is happening right under our noses but we're ignoring at our own peril. Something like a gray rhino.