This book, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and is soon to be published in the UK, is in the best traditions of American long-form reportage ... Key characters are evoked in enough detail to make us care and then carry the narrative through to the end. It involves simplifications and elisions: but in this case, these are less important than the horrified fascination Hoffman... succeeds in rousing through a story at once journalistically detailed and morally alive ... Hoffman’s flowing narrative is so seductively readable that it seems destined for a conclusion which resolves all.
... authoritative and chilling ... a readable, many-tentacled account of the decades-long military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union ... What’s particularly valuable about Mr. Hoffman’s book, however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest — and quite frankly the most terrifying — account to date of the enormous and covert Soviet biological weapons program, developed in defiance of international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile ... Mr. Hoffman has an eye for bleak, jagged details ... Mr. Hoffman is so careful not to bore his readers that he sometimes underestimates them, verging closer to Tom Clancy than to John Lewis Gaddis. More synthesis and cerebration would have made this good book better.
... unsettling ... The Dead Hand argues convincingly that America's victory in the Cold War wasn't nearly as triumphant as the most self-congratulatory among us have tended to believe ... Hoffman's book is a chillingly modern historical tale about a collective failure with lasting consequences ... The Dead Hand at times veers too quickly from stories of spies to politicians and to scientists and varied weapons facilities, and its portrait of Reagan is surprisingly benign.
Hoffman lets his saga of war and peace unroll through the eyes of those on both sides who were there at the time. In particular, tramping the length and breadth of the old USSR, he tells us how a fading, failing Kremlin leadership consistently feared an American strike that Reagan, of course, knew wasn't coming ... No: Hoffman's magisterial, human, vividly readable account of a remarkable time doesn't stop in 1991.
Hoffman’s second book is an engaging page turner that reads like a Michael Crichton novel (high praise from me!) ... Presenting new information gleaned from diaries and memoirs recently made available along with declassified government papers and interviews, Hoffman takes the reader on an adventure of international intrigue and world politics that makes us wish it were fiction and along the way answers many important questions ... Would I buy The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy? Yes, and I would recommend it even to those who did not care for Reagan. It’s an important book about an important time in world history presented factually with little or no bias. It contains a serious warning about the influence of the Cold War on the present and also our future survival.
One of the many virtues of Hoffman’s book is that it depicts not just the death-tainted hand of the military-industrial complex in the United States, but also in the Soviet Union, where supposed strongmen like Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov had considerable trouble keeping the warmongers under control ... Indeed, readers will realize how lucky we are to have escaped being destroyed at their hands ... A compendium of discomfiting, implication-heavy facts, of particular interest to students of geopolitics.
