Heonik Kwan, The Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 232 pp. $50.00

This is a challenging, insightful, and provocative book. Since the 1970s, the insights of anthropology and ethnography have radically altered the discipline of history, leading scholars to emphasize the lived experience of diverse populations and to think about large-scale political and economic transformations in new and far more productive ways. The field of diplomatic history and the study of the Cold War, by contrast, have remained largely untouched by that phenomenon. Focused on large-scale questions of state-to-state relations, geopolitics, and international economics, realists and their opposing revisionist counterparts paid little attention to questions of how local communities interpreted and lived through the Cold War's complex effects. Starting in the 1990s, a younger generation of scholars raised important questions about the Cold War's intellectual and cultural history, widening the field of vision. As Kwon convincingly argues, however, scholars have largely ignored the social history of the Cold War, and in doing...