Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design

摘要

Greg Castillo opens his book by quoting from a 1951 satire which, he argues, proved prescient: 'Operation Abundance "was both violently anti-Soviet and pro-peace" [...] Successive waves of air-dropped free samples were said to throw socialist society into disarray "as Soviet housewives saw for their own eyes American stoves, refrigerators, clothing and toys'". The Cold War, this book argues, was fought with fridges. Meticulously researched and well told, the story explores the tropes that East and West employed to characterise each other, moving back-and-fore between poles, from 1945 to 1989.