Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii
Introduction by James Graham Wilson
H-Diplo Roundtable Review
More time has transpired between the fall of the Berlin Wall and today than the entire duration of that iconic Cold War barrier. Meanwhile, George H.W. Bush, the main subject of Jeffrey Engel’s When the World Seemed New, became the longest-living U.S. president, while there are undergraduates this semester who were born during the presidency of his son, George W. Bush. In short, this book can make a lot of readers feel old.
It should also makes us feel hopeful. “Tomorrow our children will go to school and study history and how plants grow,” President Bush said in his 1992 State of the Union address. “And they won’t have, as my children did, air raid drills in which they crawl under their desks and cover their heads in case of nuclear war.”[2] Scholars can forever debate the causes and consequences of the end of the Cold War, yet one ought not lose sight of the fact that good and incredible things happened.
The reviewers here are unanimous in their praise for Engel’s research and writing. The result is a “wonderful book” in which “Engel does a terrific job recreating the tension and exhilaration” of the era, as James Goldgeier puts it. Christopher Preble calls it a “fine historical synthesis,” while Timothy Sayle finds that it “reads like a narrator’s script for a blockbuster film.” Sergey Radchenko sums up: “Engel has written a remarkably honest, thought-provoking, emotional book.”