Roosevelt's Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War Paperback - 2013

From the rear cover

"This is a delightful and innovative book. Never before has any book on U.S. foreign relations provided such insightful character sketches. Scholars have long pondered why the best and the brightest went wrong, and now Costigliola offers an explanation: superpower tensions involved more than just misperceptions, divergent ideologies, and grand strategic differences. Personal rivalries, efforts to be in FDR's good graces, parties, and sex of all sort really had a bearing on diplomacy. Costigliola has written a novel masterpiece."--Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado at Boulder

"Costigliola pulls back the veil on the personal lives of the major figures of World War II. With great verve and captivating anecdotes, he shows how personal politics helped forge and disrupt international alliances. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances combines innovative research, provocative interpretations, and page-turning prose, providing a fresh take on how gender, emotion, class, and culture shaped the high politics of World War II and the Cold War."--Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine

"In this imaginative examination of the personal dynamics of the Big Three alliance during World War II, Frank Costigliola brings an important new and intriguing perspective to the origins of the Cold War."--Ronald Steel, author of Walter Lippmann and the American Century

"This is a terrific book. Fluidly written, cogently argued, and supported by superb research, it addresses a fundamental yet underexamined dimension of both the World War II Grand Alliance and the origins of the Cold War: the personalities as well as the personal relations of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt."--Richard H. Immerman, Temple University

"Costigliola has written an important and compelling book. His character portrayals of the three great wartime leaders are among the most incisive that have ever been written. He shows how critical Roosevelt was to the functioning of the alliance and how central his demise was to the origins of the Cold War. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances is a fantastically well researched, wonderfully evocative, stimulating, and significant book."--Melvyn P. Leffler, University of Virginia

"A fascinating new history of a past we thought we knew very well already. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances represents a major intervention in the scholarship on World War II and the origins of the Cold War."--Tim Borstelmann, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Media reviews

Citations

• New York Review of Books, 03/21/2013, Page 24