Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 327.73047 BAI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 327.73047 BAI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 327.73047 BAI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 327.73047 BAI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * President Reagan's dramatic battle to win the Cold War is revealed as never before by the award-winning anchor of Special Report with Bret Baier.
"An instant classic, if not the finest book to date on Ronald Reagan." -- Jay Winik
Moscow, 1988: 1,000 miles behind the Iron Curtain, Ronald Reagan stood for freedom and confronted the Soviet empire.
In his acclaimed bestseller Three Days in January, Bret Baier illuminated the extraordinary leadership of President Dwight Eisenhower at the dawn of the Cold War. Now in his highly anticipated new history, Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the dramatic endgame of America's long struggle with the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan's central role in shaping the world we live in today.
On May 31, 1988, Reagan stood on Russian soil and addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University, delivering a remarkable--yet now largely forgotten--speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital. This fourth in a series of summits between Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, was a dramatic coda to their tireless efforts to reduce the nuclear threat. More than that, Reagan viewed it as "a grand historical moment": an opportunity to light a path for the Soviet people--toward freedom, human rights, and a future he told them they could embrace if they chose. It was the first time an American president had given an address about human rights on Russian soil. Reagan had once called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Now, saying that depiction was from "another time," he beckoned the Soviets to join him in a new vision of the future. The importance of Reagan's Moscow speech was largely overlooked at the time, but the new world he spoke of was fast approaching; the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, leaving the United States the sole superpower on the world stage.
Today, the end of the Cold War is perhaps the defining historical moment of the past half century, and must be understood if we are to make sense of America's current place in the world, amid the re-emergence of US-Russian tensions during Vladimir Putin's tenure. Using Reagan's three days in Moscow to tell the larger story of the president's critical and often misunderstood role in orchestrating a successful, peaceful ending to the Cold War, Baier illuminates the character of one of our nation's most venerated leaders--and reveals the unique qualities that allowed him to succeed in forming an alliance for peace with the Soviet Union, when his predecessors had fallen short.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Baier (Three Days in January), chief political anchor for Fox News, tenders a nostalgic account of the Reagan era and the end of the Cold War. Lauding the former president's "iron-fisted, velvet-gloved approach" to U.S.-Soviet relations while de-emphasizing the more complex forces at play in the late 1980s, he portrays Ronald Reagan as a hero for whom turning "the evil empire" onto a path of democracy was a life mission. He recounts the Reagans' first visit to Moscow in 1988 and the couple's unscripted and nearly disastrous meet-the-people stroll, revels in Reagan's anti-Communist one-liners, and asserts the president was "a far more complex human being than his critics gave him credit for." Baier's account of the tense arms negotiations and numerous summits that defined the era differs dramatically from other recent literature, in which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is given the more pivotal role. Baier also attributes the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to a speech Reagan gave more than a year earlier. Readers who hold Reagan in high regard will likely appreciate Baier's burnishing of the myths surrounding him, but those interested in a rigorous historical investigation will be disappointed. Agency: Folio Literary Management. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Fox News anchor Baier (Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission, 2017, etc.) makes a cheerful case for Ronald Reagan's single-handedly talking the Soviets out of being communists.Reagan liked to be thought of as a political outsider, but "he wasn't really." He had governing experience as the two-term chief executive of California and a network of supporters within the federal government, and he "had evolved as a public persona who could articulate the issues of the day." After a difficult period of folded-arm posturing back and forth between his White House and the Kremlin, with a few results hard-won at the arms-reduction talks in Reykjavik, Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, developed something of a working relationship by which long-closed doors opened up. One of them came in the form of an invitation to Reagan to speak to an audience at Moscow State University; in the speech he delivered on May 31, 1988, he spoke hopefully, as was his wont, of new possibilities: "Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists." Baier's three-days narrative trope doesn't stand up to close examination, and his suggestion that the Iron Curtain began to rust away the minute Reagan stepped off the podium is a little too pat; he sometimes seems to forget that, after all, Gorbachev was doing his part to end the Cold War, too. To his credit, the author does note the considerable amount of shuttle diplomacy that extended from Reagan's second term into the incoming administration of George H.W. Bush, a skilled player on the international stage. Still, a more evenhanded and altogether better account can be found in Richard Reeves' President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2005) and H.W. Brands'Reagan: The Life (2015).Popular history in a triumphant mode, of interest largely to Reagan partisans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Conservatives lionize former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Baier (chief political anchor, Fox News) and cowriter Whitney conform to this convention while skirting the thickest of the lacquer with which Reaganites coat their hero. As in 2017's Three Days in January, their superior biography of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Baier and Whitney take a single crucial event in their subject's life-in this case, Reagan's visit to Moscow in 1988-and use it to illuminate the character of an American president. The authors are happily pro-Reagan, downplaying the administration's less-than-stellar situations, such as the Iran-Contra scandal. They spout hyperbole, titling one section "Reagan's destiny" and describing 1980s U.S.-Soviet relations as the "endgame of a decades-long battle for the future of civilization." They indulge in glittering generalities and weasel words, including phrases such as "many judged that...." On the other hand, they capture Reagan's fraught but mutually warm relationship with Soviet reformist premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and they convey a good sense of Reagan's sunny yet aloof personality and leadership style. Verdict Fans of Ronald Reagan and Fox News will relish this book; other readers will prefer H.W. Brands's Reagan: The Life for a more grounded portrait.-Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Finding Reagan | p. ix |
| Prologue: The Walk | p. 1 |
| Part 1 Reagan's destiny | |
| 1 Dream Maker | p. 15 |
| 2 A Political Evolution | p. 33 |
| 3 The Greatest Stage | p. 53 |
| 4 A Revolution of Ideas | p. 87 |
| Part 2 Speaking Truth | |
| 5 The Trumpet Call | p. 115 |
| 6 Ron and Mikhail | p. 141 |
| 7 Iceland Freeze | p. 172 |
| 8 "Tear Down This Wall!" | p. 193 |
| Part 3 Three Days in Moscow | |
| 9 The True Mission | p. 227 |
| 10 Cry Freedom | p. 239 |
| 11 The Speech | p. 253 |
| 12 Morning in Moscow | p. 266 |
| Part 4 Dreams for the Future | |
| 13 The Fall | p. 285 |
| 14 Without Firing a Shot | p. 318 |
| The Last Word: 2018 | p. 327 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 337 |
| Appendix: Ronald Reagan's Speech at Moscow State University | p. 341 |
| Notes | p. 355 |
| Index | p. 383 |
