David Reynolds is a professor of international history at Cambridge University. He is the author of books including The Long Shadow and In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, which won the Wolfson Prize.
This volume of "The Global Century" series is one of 11 to be published over the next year. Reynolds (fellow, Cambridge; The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliances and Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain) writes a cursory history, hitting the global highlights. Though there is an immense amount of information, it would take a work many times this length to adequately cover world history since 1945. Reynolds's style is a bit more readable than a textbook. At times he sides with unsubstantiated accounts of events, e.g., in his description of the Kennedy assassination: "Perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; perhaps Jack Ruby shot Oswald in a fit of anger. But there are many candidates as possible accomplices." Reynolds gives excellent definitions and examples of contemporary issues and includes chapters on "culture and family" and "goods and values." The weakness of this book may also be its strength: the whirlwind tour of history comes in the sound bites that Americans seem to devour. Recommended for public libraries.--Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Reynolds (Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1943), a historian of WWII and international relations, plays up several key themes from the post-WWII period, including the march of capitalism and the erosion of the state. In an increasingly globalized economy, he suggests, multinational corporations have taken over jobs that used to belong to the state. Politics drives Reynolds's narrative, but he has made a valiant effort to integrate social history and women's history. Four chapters in particular turn the reader's eye from Khrushchev, Begin, Thatcher and Reagan to "social and cultural change": American suburbanization and consumer culture, art and music, computers and DNA ("Chips and Genes"). In his final chapter on values at the end of the century, the historian reflects on a potpourri of disparate phenomena: fundamentalism, postmodernism, in vitro fertilization, the greenhouse effect, tobacco and human rights. Sadly, however, Reynolds's social history is not as global as his political history--his discussions of culture, families and "isms" pay too much attention to Europe and America. Many will laud this book as definitive, but in the end, though it is massive in scope and will be a handy reference for readers wanting an introduction to the postwar world, the book is no replacement, as either analysis or synthesis, for Eric Hobsbawm's masterful study, The Age of Extremes. Maps. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
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