Eight experts on the history of East-Central Europe offer commentaries about the book Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1990 , edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana. The commentators discuss the main contributions of the book and highlight the important questions it raises as well as the issues requiring further research.

This review essay provides a critical assessment of a book published in 2012 by Igor Lukes, On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague . Lukes's aim in the book is to explain why the United States failed to prevent Czechoslovakia from being absorbed into the Soviet bloc after the Second World War. Although the book is highly readable and contains useful information, it is professionally unbalanced. Lukes's generally acceptable conclusions are undermined by numerous factual and methodological mistakes. These flaws stem from Lukes's frequently insufficient historical critique of his sources, his neglect of other important documentation, and his tendency to ignore much of the relevant historical literature.

Nine experts on Cold War history offer commentaries about John Lewis Gaddis's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George F. Kennan, the first head of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff. The commentators come from several countries and offer a wide range of perspectives about Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life , published by Penguin Books in 2011. Although most of the commentators express highly favorable assessments of the book, they also raise numerous points of criticism. Two of the commentators, Barton J. Bernstein and Anders Stephanson, present extended critiques of Gaddis's biography. The forum concludes with a reply by Gaddis to all the commentaries, especially those by Bernstein and Stephanson.