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

摘要

One of the truly promising developments of recent years has been the shift within the literature of design from coffee-table displays and celebrity monographs to works of genuine scholarly merit. Greg Castillo's Cold War on the Home Front is exemplary of this trend. The book opens with an account of the famous "Kitchen Debate" be- tween U.S. vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. This event is as well-known to students of the cold war as Sputnik and the U-2, but Castillo makes a novel and arresting claim about it: the exchange that took place against the background of a supposedly modern American home was not the opening salvo in a clash of ideologies, but the conclusion.