Cold War Island

'…a thought-provoking antidote to all the literature that focuses on the 'high politics' of the Cold War, while ignoring its impact on local communities. Informative, well-written, and entertaining, it approaches the Cold War through local eyes, thus making a significant contribution to our understanding of the impact of this conflict around the globe.' Beth A. Fischer, University of Toronto
'Michael Szonyi has found a whole new way to write the history of the Cold War, combining detailed local history with world politics. With immense skill, he links the stories of the islanders to a wider narrative of the conflict between east and west. This is one of the most powerful books yet written on Cold War culture in Asia.' Rana Mitter, Oxford University
'Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Szonyi's Cold War Island breaks new - and fertile -ground in the social history of the Cold War in East Asia, and at the same time delivers a sobering meditation on the consequences of militarization for all of us.' David Ownby, Université de Montréal
'Szonyi offers an extraordinary retelling of the history of the Cold War in Asia. This is the Cold War as few will recognize it - seen not from the intoxicating heights of state power, but from down in the villages of a few off-shore islands in the Taiwan Strait. The result is one of the most surprising and entertaining new books on 20th-century China.' Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia
'Michael Szonyi is neither a sensationalist nor a slave to modish nostrums in the history academy, and his well-researched book is as a result a very welcome addition to Taiwan's story.' Taipei Times
'Michael Szonyi's account of life on Quemoy is the first major account of what it had been like to live on a 'cold war island'. A social/cultural history of the people (and to a much lesser extent, the soldiers stationed on the island) from 1949 to the early 1990s, this book reveals the difficulties and oft-time tragedies of real life on the front lines of the Cold War.' Gordon H. Chang, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
'Overall as an illuminating and thought-provoking book, Cold War Island provides not only a sense of intellectual wholeness based on a global conception of social changes in Jinmen, but also the inspiration for Chinese scholars to study the civil life of Xiamen (Amoy) on the Fujian Front Line in years of the Cold War. Brilliant in methodological approaches and replete with materials, the book should prove a major contribution to the social history of the Cold War.' Dai Chaowu, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
'… what Michael Szonyi has done is to pull off a very difficult trick - create a perfectly described world in minature and link it to a genuinely global framework. For some years now, there have been calls to create a Cold War history that goes beyond the traditional concerns on international history, moving the focus from leadership elites and state-to-state relations to a vision of the period informed more by the social and cultural turn.' Rana Mitter, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
'Michael Szonyi offers a new perspective in understanding the Cold War through a case study of Jinmen from 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war to the Chinese Communists on the mainland to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. He moves his study away from the usual international approach and instead focuses on the relatively neglected area of local society. With his fresh insights into the social history of Jinmen, his book shows how the Cold War changed forever the life of men, women and children on the island.' Xiaobing Li, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews
'Michael Szonyi … effectively uses the former to elucidate the latter in this first detailed account in English of Quemoy …Szonyi's book reminds us why the island mattered during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a detailed description of the local impact of Cold War conflict.' The Journal of Asian Studies