Beautifully designed and illustrated with hundreds of photographs, this companion volume to the CNN documentary series begins with the roots of the Cold War: the military intervention by six nations (including the United States) in the Bolsheviks' 1917 Russian Revolution. The book then takes on the Cold War proper, from the post-World War II rise of the Iron Curtain to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet government in the early 1990s. "For forty-five years," the authors write, "the peoples of the world held their breath," through missile crises, policies of "mutual assured destruction," the Vietnam War, and the uneasy steps toward détente and full peace highlighted by Richard Nixon's meetings with Leonid Brezhnev and by Mikhail Gorbachev's meetings with Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Special sections highlight the role of spies in the Cold War, as well as the films and literature of the era. This is a copiously detailed account of the major historical force of the latter half of the 20th century that would make an excellent reference book for any household.