A Simple Guide To Finding Your Ideal Cold War Author

By Amanda Baird


For most of the second half of the Twentieth Century, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies. This atmosphere of fear and distrust made for some riveting stories, told through media like movies, musicals and of course books. With such a wide variety of books on the theme, it may be difficult to choose which Cold War author is your ideal storyteller. It may help you if you know what type of book you're looking for.

The Cold War was not a war in the true sense of the word. While the two opposing sides often got involved in armed conflicts in other parts of the world, from Korea and Vietnam to the liberation wars of Africa, they never directly fired shots on each other's soil. Of course the main deterrent was fear of causing another world war but this fear also kept the tension between capitalism and communism alive for almost half a decade.

Where countries don't trust one another, there will be spies. By far the most popular genre dealing with the era is the spy thriller. After all, the espionage theme has almost unlimited possibilities for adventure, action, intrigue and romance.

One of the masters of the spy thriller is British writer John Le Carre, creator of, among others, 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold', 'The Tailor of Panama', 'The Russia House' and 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'. Le Carre used his insider's knowledge as a former spy for the British secret service to great effect, just like fellow ex-agent Graham Greene did. Journalists often made great tellers of spy stories too, with Frederick Forsythe a prime example.

Sometimes a character would come back in spy story after spy story. Several of these characters even made it into cinema history. For instance, Harrison Ford brought Jack Ryan, the secret agent created by Tom Clancy, to life in several films, as did Matt Damon with Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum. Ian Fleming created the ultimate spy hero, a character that almost every male actor would love to play at least once: agent 007, James Bond.

Life behind the Iron Curtain also inspired writers from communist countries, like political activist and later president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. Some writers got into trouble with the authorities though. The Czech writer Milan Kundera lived in exile, for instance, while the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas and the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn both spent time in prison and eventually were forced to leave their home soil.

If you prefer non-fiction, you'll find a wealth of books that deal with every aspect of the era. There are political analyses, accounts of incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis and biographies of key figures in the world arena. The stories of regular people are particularly moving, like those told in Anna Funder's 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall', about life in communist East Germany.

It's easy to find books on the era that defined the second half of the 1900s. A simple online search will point you in the right direction but you can also ask at any library or bookstore. Once you've found a Cold War author whose work you like, you'll be hooked.




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