Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of the Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 296 pp. $99.00

Kaeten Mistry's ably researched and argued book is based on the premise that Italy's elections of April 1948 had “profound ramifications” (p. 2) for both the country itself and the United States. Of the two, Mistry emphasizes Washington's story more than Rome’s. He asks how Italy, despite its status as a “peripheral concern” (p. 4–5) for the United States, assumed central importance in Washington's postwar struggle with Moscow and how the United States drew lessons from the Italian case. Mistry's book is not a history of the April 1948 vote and should not be directly compared to Robert Ventresca's excellent study of that election, From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Elections of 1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Although Mistry makes effective use of Italy's Central State Archives and Foreign Ministry Archives, most of his sources are found in the United States, and his work...