As memories of the Cold War recede, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what it was about and why it evoked such feelings of intensity and fatalism. Fortunately, we have a gold mine of movies and novels to help us recall why an entire generation of Americans grew up ducking under school desks in air raid drills and stocking the family bomb shelter. Cold War Fantasies retrieves those times, based on the idea that a nation's history, self-concept, and collective anxiety are reflected in popular culture. In Cold War Fantasies, Ronnie Lipschutz combines an historical account of foreign and domestic politics from 1945 to 1995 with summaries and analyses of thirty novels and films contemporaneously published and produced. Lipschutz rejects the standard line on the Cold War and critically examines the impacts and effects of language and images on politics. Viewing those films and reading those novels enables the reader to come away with a clearer sense of how people felt during the Cold War period—about themselves, about 'the enemy,' and about the world while living in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Written by a cultural historian, this text offers a wide-ranging exploration of the causes, meaning and continuing significance of the American war in Vietnam, arguing that the war was not a mistake, or a quagmire but a defining event in global history.

As memories of the Cold War recede, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what it was about and why it evoked such feelings of intensity and fatalism. Fortunately, we have a gold mine of movies and novels to help us recall why an entire generation of Americans grew up ducking under school desks in air raid drills and stocking the family bomb shelter. Cold War Fantasies retrieves those times, based on the idea that a nation's history, self-concept, and collective anxiety are reflected in popular culture. In Cold War Fantasies, Ronnie Lipschutz combines an historical account of foreign and domestic politics from 1945 to 1995 with summaries and analyses of thirty novels and films contemporaneously published and produced. Lipschutz rejects the standard line on the Cold War and critically examines the impacts and effects of language and images on politics. Viewing those films and reading those novels enables the reader to come away with a clearer sense of how people felt during the Cold War period--about themselves, about "the enemy," and about the world while living in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

American Science Fiction--in both literature and film--has played a key role in the portrayal of the fears inherent in the Cold War. The end of this era heralds the need for a reassessment of the literary output of the forty-year period since 1945. Working through a series of key texts, American Science Fiction and the Cold War investigates the political inflections put on American narratives in the post-war decades by Cold War cultural circumstances. Nuclear holocaust, Russian invasion, and the perceived rise of totalitarianism in American society are key elements in the author's exploration of science fiction narratives that include Fahrenheit 451, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Dr. Strangelove.

Womb Fantasies examines the womb, an invisible and mysterious space invested with allegorical significance, as a metaphorical space in postwar cinematic and literary texts grappling with the trauma of post-holocaust, postmodern existence. In addition, it examines the representation of visible spaces in the texts in terms of their attribution with womb-like qualities. The framing of the study historically within the postwar era begins with a discussion of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair in the context of the Cold War’s need for safety in light of the threat of nuclear destruction, and ranges over films such as Marguerite Duras’ and Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour and Duras’ novel The Vice-Consul, exploring the ways that such cultural texts fantasize the womb as a response to trauma, defined as the compulsive need to return to the site of loss, a place envisioned as both a secure space and a prison. The womb fantasy is linked to the desire to recreate an identity that is new and original but ahistorical.

In the second novel in a thrilling Cold War fantasy series, American magician Karen O'Neil travels to Cuba to find a missing young girl intertwined with a new kind of magic that threatens to upend the balance of power of the whole world. AFTER THE WALL FELL, NOTHING COULD BE THE SAME. In Cold War Berlin, American magician Karen O'Neil defeated the ghosts of Germany's past and sealed the breach that threatened the whole world, but in doing so she learned a terrible truth: Magic cannot be trusted. Despite her wariness of the new and growing powers she gained in Germany, Karen agrees to help an old friend and is drawn to Cuba, a world of opulence run by a corrupt government and ruthless, magic-obsessed mobsters. In Havana, while the fires of revolution kindle, Karen searches for a missing girl whose fate is intertwined with impossible and deadly magic. And she knows she's being watched; both the Soviets and the CIA have designs on this island paradise, and their eyes are everywhere. But spies and rebels aren't the only dangers hiding in Havana's long shadows, and Karen will learn that the future can be just as dangerous as the past. MANKIND WILL ALWAYS FIND NEW WAYS TO CREATE MONSTERS.