Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War

Written by Duncan White

Narrated by Fred Sanders

A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to exile, imprisonment or execution if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had secret agents and vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turning on each other, lovers cleaved by political fissures, artists undermined by inadvertent complicities.

In Cold Warriors, Harvard University’s Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book has at its heart five major writers—George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and Andrei Sinyavsky—but the full cast includes a dazzling array of giants, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, Joan Didion, Isaac Babel, Howard Fast, Lillian Hellman, Mikhail Sholokhov —and scores more.

Spanning decades and continents and spectacularly meshing gripping narrative with perceptive literary detective work, Cold Warriors is a welcome reminder that, at a moment when ignorance is celebrated and reading seen as increasingly irrelevant, writers and books can change the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062890740

Duncan White

Duncan White is an award-winning journalist and academic. He is Assistant Director of the History and Literature department at Harvard University and a lead book reviewer for the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: Late Modernism, the Cold War and the Literary Marketplace. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Reviews for Cold Warriors

[foof2you · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A look at the Cold War through the eyes of writers and the books they wrote. American and the Soviets governments spend a lot of money to get there side heard during the Cold War and the varies purges in Russia during its early years. While one thinks of the Cold war as build ups in weapons, defense spending and the space race there was also a race to influence to influence readers about their side of the story. It is interesting to see how books played as role in this battle.. A battle for ideas played out in writing through articles, journals, magazines, books, and literary conferences on both side of the Atlantic.

[razinha-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So last year an uncorrected proof of this book arrived from the publisher and I had no idea why. I didn't request it and when I called the number on the return label to find out which source had it sent (I request books from different sites) so I could post the review the guy I got said he was a warehouse and just shipped whatever book to whatever address he's told to. The book I had requested took a couple more months, which worked out in my favor because I got a full printed copy of that one. Anyway, none of my resources listed this up for offer so I shelved it to eventually get to, as the subject did look interesting. Then, back in August, I picked it up. Yes, August. It's a dense text and I kept setting it aside for other books.White has put together a sweeping case for the pen being mightier than the sword (though we all know that the mutually assured destruction had more than a bit to do with the end of the so-called Cold War...) He admits that there is no real way to measure how effective literature was in affecting the readers of both sides, but as he lays out over his 700 pages the US and Soviet Union both took it seriously.I was fascinated at all of the various spying some prominent and less prominent but no less influential novelists did. The NKVD really got it claws into quite a few. And the incredible resources applied to combating the two political paradigms is boggling. Long before Putin set his sights on using social media to bring about his desired outcome for an election, the Soviet Union was backing peace conferences in the West - lion and lamb metaphors are implied. And the US intelligence agencies funded their own anti-Soviet conferences and publications. The Soviets were quicker out of the box, though and the West had some catching up to do, slow to realize that they were already infiltrated.McCarthy's rabid zeal for trapping communist sympathies was at least mostly public. The Soviet writers, and composers (Shostakovitch really comes to mind) and other artists, had it worse than a blacklist. When Isaac Babel was arrested by the NKVD in 1939, they sealed his study after removing everything written from it and then began pulling his books from libraries. "The man had been arrested; the writer was being erased." Nikolai Yezhov, perpetrator of so many horrors before becoming a victim of his own machine said, "We are launching an attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you cop wood, chips fly." The number of flying chips is to this day numbing.Some writers profiled here - that's rather an understatement; chronicled, illuminated, ... revealed/unveiled, is more accurate - are widely known of by the masses (example: Orwell). Some less so, and some quite a bit less so as they've fallen into the great melting pot of history. And White has captured a lot of history. A lot. This was a dismal time for many, and for the Soviets, tragic, caught up in Purges and more. The text reads well, and at times like a thriller. As with most histories, an author can only know so much (if really at all) and must necessarily fill in. Skilled historians do so with insight, non-historian hacks like Martin Dugard and his co-"writer" make up stuff. White is skilled. One small note I flagged I'll shared here. White quoted FDR:Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know books are weapons.So... inspiration for Bradbury?

[lizzied_11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White is popular history at its best. Historians or the average reader who stayed on top of the political situation for the past fifty years or so may be impatient with White's careful explanations (perestroika and glasnost defined, for example), but for those of us who were not paying attention at the time, this book sweeps us along with clarity. Even experts may find much to enjoy because White gets at his subject through a focus on the writers on both sides of the conflict. Beginning with the Spanish Civil War, journalists and writers of fiction were not merely observers and reporters but often spies too. We follow Orwell and Koestler, Stephen Spender and Hemingway, Graham Greene and Mary McCarthy with much the same eagerness that a good spy novel generates. We also follow Isaac Babel and Andrei Sinyavsky and Anna Akhmatova in the earlier years, and then branch out to see McCarthy in North Vietnam and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Literature mattered. These authors used their craft to persuade and were also used by their governments. White closes his book by considering changes in culture that have weakened literature as a weapon in our current cold war but not destroyed the power of writers who live and write truth.Thanks to Early Reviewers for my galley copy of this good book. I'll probably buy a copy eventually so that I can have it with an index.

[pinebranch · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is history told from a different perspective from most books and classes. The writers, poets and playwrights whose stories are told here aren't obscure, but they aren't conventionally powerful. The main message of Cold Warriors is that, in the 20th century, literature was perceived as powerful, and governments on both sides of the century's great contest wanted it on their side.Telling the story of the half-century-long Cold War requires a running start and a cooldown, so the book starts in the Spanish Civil War and end with discussion of Putin's Russia. There's a lot of material here, and I sometimes found myself wondering why I was getting so much detail on the life of a writer I haven't read. I would have enjoyed it more if I knew more of the writers; the upside is that I now know a few more I should probably read.This book is a mix of Cold War history, literary history, and biography. It benefits from distance from the events, since more of what was going on is now known. The focus on writers is a valuable perspective, especially since they were writing from inside the story. They fought in the wars. They were spies in the intelligence wars. They witnessed first-hand the oppression that fell on unwanted opposition and truth-tellers. One even became a head of state.It's a long book, and because the of the time scale, I found myself with different responses to different periods. Reading about pre-WWII contests of vibrant and complex ideologies helped me understand the 1980s views of a grandparent who came of age during those arguments. The sections on the later Cold War helped put events into a single timeline and introduce me to some of the thinkers who supported what we would think of as the other side.It's a long book, but I found it picking up momentum in the last few hundred pages. Some of that was probably familiarity—I remember some of those events. But knowing that the Cold War ended, you start to feel the end coming, even as the Soviet government tried to reassert control through continued repression.The author's closing thoughts on the relative importance of literature (and ideology, really) in the 20th century compared to now made for a fitting conclusion and solid food for continued thought. And really, what else can you ask of a history book?

[capewood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I received an uncorrected proof of this book from librarything.com in return for an unbiased review.First I'll say it's a daunting book. At about 700 pages it's a commitment. It was hard to get into. In my mind I think of the cold war as starting after WW2, but the author goes back to the beginning, almost back to the Russian Revolution. He charts how left leaning novelists in the west were, basically seduced by Communism, back in the 1930's. Many took up the caused in the Spanish Revolution, fighting or writing against the Franco led Fascists. This was the hardest part of the book for me. I wasn't familiar with the history or many of the writers involved. But it was well worth pushing through this section.The book follows several writers through this period, and through the war into the 50's and later. It was interesting to read about American writers who got caught up in Communism in the '30s and '40s only to run aground in the McCarthy hearings in the '50s. Or other western writers, who believing they were intellectually independent learned that organizations they belonged to were fronted by the CIA. Then there were western who actually worked for intelligence agencies, like John Le Carre or Graham Greene.On the whole, Western authors, even those who suffered prison after McCarthy, fared better than their Russian counterparts. From the beginning, the Soviets seemed to recognize the propaganda potential or literature. Many who wrote material unacceptable to the government in the '30s ended up in prison camps, internal exile or dead.Later parts of the book, especially those dealing with the fall of Communism were more interesting to me because I remembered the incidents. For example, Solzhenitsyn's winning the Nobel Prize then not being allowed to leave the country to accept it. Or Vaclev Havel, a playwright, becoming the president of a new Czechoslovakia. I was reading an uncorrected proof and noticed a number of grammatical errors which I hope were corrected. The book table of contents wasn't really complete. One thing sorely needed, in my opinion was a list of organizations and perhaps the authors mentioned. There are a lot of people mentioned, so an index would also have come in handy.

[paulmb-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Little has been written about the role writers played in the cold war, and perhaps it is because most might not think it a topic of interest. Duncan White, with his new book “Cold Warriors”, has skillfully illuminated this period and the authors of that time. With over 700 pages White leads us history buffs on a journey of suspense, intrigue, torture, spies, and world wide political war. Backed with numerous pages of notes and references, this work is in my opinion the most complete historical record of the cold war writers to date.The shear length of the book with its many players make it a daunting read. However, White entraps the reader in expert style, and quickly the book becomes difficult to put down. I give “Cold Warriors” five stars.

[illiniguy71 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A lengthy and detailed history of literary people on both sides of the Cold War and how their respective governments tried to use them for political gain--the governments of Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia. Actually the book begins with Orwell, Koestler, & Spender in the Spanish Civil War & only gets up to 1945 after about 200 pages. It goes to the end of the Soviet Union stopping off in Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, & elsewhere. In the latter place, I knew nothing of the poet Gioconda Belli or how important poetry was to the Sandinistas. Sometimes the detail seems excessive, but more often it is fascinating. An important but very readable work.

[berthirsch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cold Warriors by Duncan WhiteDuncan White is a lecturer in both history and literature at Harvard University and his new book, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, is a worthwhile read for anyone with these dual interests. It roughly covers the span from the Spanish Civil war to the fall of the Berlin War and the Soviet Union. It depicts the unique role writers played in the ongoing struggle for dominance between the Western capitalist societies and the Socialist sphere dominated by Russia. George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ernest Hemingway, Mary McCarthy, Kim Philby, John Le Carre, Graham Greene, Howard Fast, Richard Wright, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel become major characters in this wide-ranging tale. White does an excellent job of providing back stories with little gems and gossip to enhance this tale of intrigue and courage. On the political side he makes it clear that the Soviet, American and British Secret Services attempted to both promote, suppress and manipulate these writers to their own pollical gains. Both Le Carre and Graham were themselves of both spheres, starting off as government agents before they became masters of fiction and suspense. Hemingway led a small regiment of partisan fighters to aid the liberation of Paris at the end of WW II. Vaclav Havel ended up as President of Czechoslovakia becoming a major player in the fall of the Soviet Empire while partying with Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones and designating Frank Zappa as a roving cultural envoy for this newly independent country. Due to Duncan White’s deep understanding of both history and literature, his fine writing, fun tidbits and grasp of the larger picture this 700 odd page book is a quick and entertaining read that I recommend to those interested in the history of writers as political persons.

[barlow304 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This monumental work (in both senses of the word) discusses the way the Soviet Union and the United States tried to exploit literature as part of the Cold War. Written with great authority by Professor White, the book works as a group biography of writers East and West, who either consciously set out to change hearts and minds or were used that way by the CIA or the KGB. For a general reader, the book has a lot of inside baseball. Would a general interest reader really care about Mary McCarthy and her adventures in Vietnam, which has zero impact on the outcome of that sad war? I don’t think so. Too often the book gets bogged down in intramural controversies among Western leftist intellectuals and writers. In spite of this, the book has many engrossing passages, such as George Orwell’s adventures in Spain and the heroic resistance of Soviet writers in the 1950s and 1960s. Although I think this book has limited appeal to a general audience, Cold Warriors is an indispensable guide to the way both sides exploited literature as a propaganda weapon. The book also serves as a timely reminder that the struggle to inform and persuade the general public continues to this day, although through other means.

[bbrad_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

White's tales of writers and the Cold War is an admirable collection of history, biography and gossip. He deals with writers in the Soviet bloc and in the West, with the latter getting much more ink. His starting point is the Spanish civil war and the pull of leftist writers to the Republican side: Orwell, Spender, Koestler, Hemingway.Orwell's disillusion with the Spanish communists gives us ANIMAL FARM and 1984. Those two books and, later, Pasternak's DR. ZHIVAGO, are undoubtedly the most read of the works mentioned in White's work, followed perhaps by Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO and ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH. These are all anti-communist. In fact, White discusses no work of fiction glorifying communism that makes a dent in the West.In the capitalism v. Marxism dialogue that White's writers attempt, some are motivated by additional concerns: Graham Greene by his Catholicism; Richard Wright by his pan-African anticolonialism and racial politics in the United States.McCarthyism and the Red baiting of the 1950s in the States touches many writers and other artists: Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer, Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, Mary McCarthy, to name some. All are mentioned by White.The book's ambition - to document writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Cold War - is also its burden. A lot happened between 1937 and 1991, and White tries to cram it all in. I enjoyed the telling, all 700 pages of it, particularly the personal anecdotes culled from memoirs and interviews. But it's a slog that might drag down many readers.

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this big new book about the intersection of two of my favorite subjects, the Cold War and 20th century literature. Special focus on Orwell, Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Solzhenitsyn, le Carré, Richard Wright, Koestler, and several others. It doesn’t really have a focused thesis, but instead gathers and retells the stories of how these writers were shaped (some of them deformed) by the Cold War, and how they shaped the Cold War in return.I’m particularly interested in anti-communists who can’t bring themselves to actually like the West. Solzhenitsyn is the great example: when he spent his twenty years or so in exile, he made a lot of American anti-communists uncomfortable by not shutting up about the spiritually dead materialism of the West.Also, John le Carré is moderately anti-American, and when it comes down to it fairly ambivalent about Britain too, but, unlike Graham Greene, he never got to the point that he let his anti-Americanism lead him to get romantic about Soviet totalitarianism, for which he always had a healthy, clear-eyed disgust. Both Greene and le Carré had been spies in the British intelligence service, but only Greene maintained friendly relations with traitor Kim Philby after he was exposed and fled to the U.S.S.R. Philby had been his boss in the intelligence service, and apparently Greene was not a grudge holder. Le Carré, whose cover Philby blew, did hold a grudge. Rightfully so. When Philby, mothballed in his Moscow flat and soaked to the gills in gin, got around to writing his K.G.B.-edited memoir, Greene wrote the forward. Le Carré, on the other hand, refused to meet Philby when he first went to the U.S.S.R. during the glasnost period. Philby was a big fan of his and apparently hoped he’d help him put together a second (more honest?) memoir. It didn’t happen and Philby died shortly after.I understand why Western anti-communist liberals get bent out of shape when they learn that the journals which they’ve been editing or writing for are secretly funded by the C.I.A., because no one like to be an unwitting dupe of anyone, especially in a way that compromises your reputation as an independent intellectual. But you’ve got to admit that it says a lot about the moral force of the Western order of battle in the ideological war that the C.I.A. recognized that one of the best ideological weapons against communism was these journals of liberal free expression (Encounter, Paris Review, others) into which they secretly dumped money but over which they exercised zero editorial control. At the same time the Soviets were enforcing the state supremacy of socialist realism (“boy meets girl meets tractor”) with persecution, exile, Gulag camps, and executions in the basement of the Lubyanka.

[wchagen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a significant work. The advanced review copy I read runs to nearly seven hundred pages; all well written and referenced. White stated in the introduction than an avowed purpose of the book is to rekindle interest in those authors who, in his opinion, dominated most of the twentieth century literary scene. He has succeeded. I consider myself to be moderately well read but must confess that the vast majority of those authors he discusses are unknown to me. Several instances, especially when he enumerates those attending a particular writer’s conference, read like a telephone directory. My interest has been rekindled in some of those authors I recognize and I will search out the works of those I do not recognize. The contents are ordered chronologically beginning in the 1930s with the Spanish Civil War and extending to the 1990s with what was assumed to be the end of the Cold War. The writers, their works and events discussed are often entwined with or involved in the actions of the intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain. That involvement is a central part of the book and makes for interesting reading. I began reading with the naive thought that the Cold War was a struggle between two competing socio-economic ideologies—Capitalism on one side and Marxism the other. There is no such ideology represented in the works of those writers whose roots are embedded in the Spanish Civil War. There is no focused ideology of any sort; only a generalized struggle against the suppression of ideas by German Nationalism, Italian Fascism and the Franco’s totalitarianism by writers focused on freedom of expression. This lapse is probably intentional. It emphasizes this book is not intended to be a history in the broad sense but only an account of the writer’s experiences and how their work was influenced by the Cold War—the subtitle says that. The image of the Cold War that emerges is that of a glob with the ideological struggle of Communism versus Capitalism as a central core but with an assortment of ancillary struggles careening through; trajectories influenced by the gravitational pull of that central core but, as time went on, increasingly oblivious of its importance. Examples include diplomacy for its own sake, commercial competition (spheres of influence as a form of neo-colonialism?), militarism, et al. For most of us the Cold War was a simple matter of us versus them. As with many books with such a wide scope, much fruit remains on the branches begging to be picked. The tugging of contrary motivations—free expression of thought and action versus the inherent need for discipline in the writing process might be a classic example of cognitive dissonance. Did an underlying angst spur creativity? There is ample suggestion that it did. That study ought to make an interesting dissertation. Graham Greene’s comment regarding the relationship between the Catholic Church and Marxism was mentioned near the end of the book. Liberation Theology was (is?) a force in Central and South America during the Cold War. Has Greene’s thought influenced Putin’s cozy relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church? The book ends with the question: Who won the Cold War and did the writers affect the outcome? I think not. The plight of the world’s poor and powerless is little improved. Nazi book burning has been replaced by picket lines preventing a free discourse of ideas on college campuses and autocracies have been replaced by theocracies. Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ is recognizable today as ‘political correctness’. If the dismemberment of the USSR is a meaningful metric, that was a pure and simple economic victory. Reagan’s policy of spending Moscow under the table with his Star Wars Doctrine did the trick. Would the Russian and Chinese hybrid ideologies of today suffer the same fate?

[rosecityreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This new book examines how literature became a battlefield in the Cold War, with governments on both sides using books and authors to influence public opinion. Whether the US government was shipping pro-West books to soldiers or supporting modernist writing in the name of freedom, or the Soviet government was subsiding sympathetic writers and prosecuting dissenters, both sides engaged in a "book race" every bit as fierce as the contemporaneous arms race. Duncan White looks at writers who directly influenced the Cold War, like George Orwell with his books Animal Farm and 1984, others like Graham Greene whose body of work spans the Cold War, a few like Vaclav Havel who were directly involved in key moments, and others less familiar but central to crucial moments in the Cold War. It is a trove of nerdy book history for Cold War literature lovers.

[wwj_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope --- such is James Joyces work,” bellowed Karl Radek. I read Joyce under John Bellairs, and I lived with a woman who read Molly, naked under a silk sheet, I wonder what they would have thought of that. One tidbit that leapt out at me from Duncan White’s Cold Warriors. Run, do not walk, to your favorite book store to get your copy. Make Duncan’s day, buy it in hardcover. I’ve read, and enjoyed most of the books on the cover, but other than Animal Farm can’t think of others by those authors. Certainly never biographies. I will have to look now, and Sinyavsky has been added to my TBR pile.I had known Orwell had fought in Spain, I hadn’t known he had been wounded or came that close to execution. Perhaps Stalin would have done better if he had been less worried about the purity of his followers. And the idea of McCarthy wandering around Hanoi in a Chanel suit boggles the mind. Cold Warriors is entertaining and a lively read.

[dgryan1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was very well done. The author does a fabulous job of elucidating the role that writers and literature played in the Cold War. He explains that the writers were often unaware of the activities of intelligence agencies to use them or their works in the decades-long battle between East and West to win hearts and minds. There was much detail and background information about how some of the famous works of the period came to be written. The personal stories of writers, set in the various momentous events of the period, bring to life the struggle being waged between competing ideologies. Some of the highlights were George Orwell's time in the Spanish Civil War, and the subsequent writing of Animal Farm and 1984, as well as stories about Koestler, Spender, Greene, Hemingway, Mary McCarthy, Boris Pasternak, Havel, and Nicaraguan poet, Gioconda Belli. All have dedicated sections in the book, though the story is structured around specific time periods, so that a part of a writer's story is told and then picked back up again at a later date. I particularly enjoyed the information on Boris Pasternak and the publication of Dr. Zhivago. The section on John Le Carre, and the impact of books such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was also very interesting, as was the weaving in of the treason committed by Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five. A good deal of the book is also devoted to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a very good way to revisit historical events like the Vietnam War, Prague Spring, and the last days of the Cold War. Even though I knew the conclusion, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Solidarity Movement, and Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the ending still had a sense of suspense that kept me up late turning pages. An interesting and entertaining book that I would highly recommend.

[rhbouchard_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a terrific book. This was so interesting and it moves at a brisk pace. This could have been dull as dirt, but it weaves (literally, it moves back and forth between authors) a fascinating story - despite being about intellectuals. Some of the subjects are obscure and others famous (e.g., Hemingway, Orwell, LeCarre), but the obscure. ones have interesting tales as well. My only nit would be he mentions John Steinbeck in passing and would have liked some more insight on his role.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, Duncan White argues, “To understand how literature took shape and developed in the twentieth century, we have to pay attention to how writers in both blocs responded to and negotiated these enmeshed dynamics” between official support and sanction based on the ideology they evinced, or appeared to advocate, in their work (pg. 12). White’s book “takes the form of a group biography, tracing the interconnected lives and works of writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain from the origins of the Cold War to its final unraveling. [His] aim is to tell the story of the literary Cold War from both sides of the Iron Curtain, as, just like the larger Cold War itself, the fight over literature was one locked in interdependence” (pg. 11). This led the United States, through various governmental agencies mostly linked to the Central Intelligence Agency, to support modernist works while the Soviet Union, primarily through the Department of International Communication and the state publisher Gosizdat, to support socialist realist work.Discussing the Soviet Communist involvement in the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in July 1937, White writes, “Using front groups to disguise their involvement, the Soviet Union clandestinely funded gatherings of sympathetic intellectuals (with travel and accommodation paid) in the hope that these intellectuals, would help sway public opinion in their own countries. A few knew that money was coming from Moscow and did not care; the majority were in the dark… It was a means of weaponizing culture that would persist into the Cold War” (pg. 77-78). White describes the waning days of World War II and the rise of the CIA from the former OSS, with the CIA inheriting the elitist attitudes of the OSS. He writes, “If in the aftermath of the Second World War there were to be a Pax Americana, these representatives of the American elite believed strongly that it should be based not just on economic and military power but also on strong cultural foundations… This meant that while the CIA was gathering intelligence, destabilizing regimes, and conducting covert actions, it was also invested in promoting art and literature that it perceived as being in the American interest… It was important, though, that such cultural propaganda be kept secret if it were to prove effective; the officers of the OSS prepared to use their new agency to open a literary front in the Cold War” (pg. 197). Once international congresses waned as a propaganda tool, “the idea of attacking intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union [became] the focus of an ambitious new phase in the way America waged the cultural Cold War” (pg. 263).Write describes Isaiah Berlin’s memorandum on U.S.-Soviet relations, “Berlin’s memorandum had nowhere near the impact of Kennan’s telegram, but it did make an important argument about how culture might play an important role in any future conflict with the Soviet Union. Berlin emphasized, over and again, quite how potent literature was in Soviet life. Even works of transparent propaganda sold out and… writers had political potential of which the state was fearful… Helping that dangerous commodity of ideas to circulate would seem to be in the interests of those looking to undermine the Soviet Union” (pg. 278). Meanwhile, in the United States, American and British intelligence services worked to support publication of an anti-communist intellectual magazine, Encounter, to reach to anti-communist left. First and foremost, the project needed to avoid the appearance of official propaganda in order to be effective. While “a lot of effort had gone into disguising the fact that the magazine was funded by American interests, …to run a piece as bluntly anti-Communist as [Leslie] Fielder’s [about the Rosenbergs] was self-defeating” (pg. 351). White concludes that, while editor Stephen Spender claimed he never knew the origin of the magazine’s funding, this may have been wilful ignorance for someone who was simply looking for work. Discussing Senator McCarthy’s targeting of the United States Information Service’s Overseas Library program, White writes, “A directive went out banning books written by ‘any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travellers [sic], et cetera’ and while the phrase ‘any controversial persons’ was withdrawn the following day, the libraries were soon being cleared of anything remotely controversial… In a moment that became symbolic of the excesses of McCarthyism, some libraries, without a place to store them, burned the banned books” (pg. 390). While such actions would seem contrary to the actions of an open society, White describes further moral compromises in the name of combating communism. He writes, “In what would become a recurring theme all over the world, the Americans and the British aligned themselves with politically repugnant groups because they believed it the most effective way to fight encroaching Communism. In Germany, that meant collaborating with former Nazis” (pg. 479).Meanwhile, the CIA and other groups continued to fund publications that aligned with U.S. policy. White writes, the “assumption that books had the capacity to change people in ways that other methods could not was unsurprising in this generation of college-educated Americans: it underpinned the liberal arts ethos that was fundamental to the way they had been educated… As a result, the CIA also secretly subsidized publishers who brought out banned books in their original languages, presuming some of these would find their way into the Eastern bloc” (pg. 434). This support of literature shifted perceptions of the conflict. Writes White, “As the stakes grew higher [in the Cuban Missile Crisis], the agents of the United States also drifted into the make-believe. It was not just that espionage blurred the lines between fact and fiction, it was that spies were creating alternate realities. They were weaponizing storytelling, and the deeper they sunk into this imaginary world, the less believable their stories got” (pg. 457). As evidence, White cites the various assassination plots against Castro, some involving poison-laced cigars, other exploding seashells. Eventually, however, these actions would become public knowledge, with the government-backed propaganda further inflaming political tensions. White writes, “The revelations about the CIA’s clandestine support of writers and artists were part of a larger Cold War reckoning in the United States. The intellectuals themselves either tried their best to distance themselves from any suggestion of complicity or, in the case of those who had not taken the CCF’s money, gleefully attacked those who had” (pg. 533).In his conclusion, White counters the idea that current tensions between Russia and the United States represent a resurgence of the Cold War. He writes, “Literature is no longer conceived of as a weapon to be deployed in cultural warfare: it is hard to imagine the publication of a novel precipitating a geopolitical crisis in the manner of Doctor Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago. One of the reasons for this is that both sides are no longer trying to sell each other on their social, economic, and political systems. All the major players in world politics are capitalist, on a scale from the social democratic to the authoritarian” (pg. 691). Though literature may not play the role it once did in geopolitics, White’s monograph demonstrates its importance in giving disenfranchised groups a voice and a rallying cry. Further, his research uncovers numerous examples where literature granted political dissidents and others the power to survive dehumanizing conditions. The book will appeal to scholars of the Cold War and literary history, being particularly useful as a course text in classes focused on Cold War or European history.