THE WISE MEN Six Friends and the World They Made

This highly detailed account of the lives of six prominent architects of American foreign policy in the Cold War era offers an illuminating perspective on many important decisions from Lend-Lease to the hydrogen bomb. The six protagonists embody "the Establishment" in an era when the phrase had real meaning. They formed part of a network of men with similar values and backgrounds who truly did shape the world. The book, first published in 1986, lacks the perspective of a post-Cold War world and, perhaps, revelations from Russian archives opened in the 1990s. Narrator Jonathan Reese does a workmanlike job of conveying an enormous amount of information with interest. Reese seems completely at home with the language of the Cold War. F.C. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2013]