One world divisible : a global history since 1945 / David Reynolds.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 703-819) and index.

The mushroom cloud and the iron curtain
Communist revolutions, Asian style
Legacies of empire
Two Europes, two Germanies
Cities and consumers
Eyeball to eyeball, shoulder to shoulder
Color, creed, and coups
East wind, west wind
Cultures and families
Superpower detente, communist confrontation
Israel, oil, and Islam
Capitalist revolutions, Asian style
Challenges for the West
Chips and genes
The crisis of communism
States, wealth, and order after the Cold War
Goods and values

This masterful history of the world in our time captures the ground-level drama of events & the larger contours of change in a period of global transformation. Global change has accelerated at an unprecedented pace in the last half-century, affecting every aspect of daily life, public & private, throughout the world. The trajectory of change points in different directions, with the world growing at once more connected & more fragmented. Commerce & migrations, television & the World Wide Web, suggest a story of growing interconnection. The proliferation of nation-states; the divisions rooted in religion, race, & material inequality; tell one of separation & conflict. At the heart of Reynolds' (international relations, Cambridge U.) is the political story of world upheavals, including the Cold War, the Chinese revolution, independence movements across the Third World, crises in Cuba and Vietnam, and the fall of the Soviet Union. But he considers these just the visible peaks of a continuing subterranean political change, which he charts as well. The history is not illustrated.