An excellent, invigorating account of the fantastic writers in both sides from the Iron Drape who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the span of the Cold Battle.

Through the Cold Battle, literature was both sword and noose. Books, essays and poems could earn the hearts and minds of those caught between the contending creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also result in exile, imprisonment or execution if they offended those in power. The clandestine about Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cool Battle intelligence providers of the United States, Britain as well as the Soviet Union got secret providers and vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. However the battles were personal, too: friends turning on one another, fans cleaved by political fissures, artists undermined by inadvertent complicities.

In Chilly Warriors, Harvard University’s Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both edges of the Iron Drape. The book has at its center five major writers-George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and Andrei Sinyavsky-but the entire 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 function, Cold Warriors can be a welcome reminder that, at a moment when ignorance is normally celebrated and reading viewed as increasingly irrelevant, writers and books can change the world.