Description: "Professor DeLuca provides a masterful overview of Mikhail Gorbachev and his era. Absorbingly written, the book explores Gorbachev's intentions, strategies, successes, and failures. The author depicts Gorbachev as the Soviet Union's first western-style media savvy politician who believed that the force of his will, the passion of his rhetoric, and his skill at manipulating the press could transform the USSR from an obsolescent, dispirited, grey dictatorship into the vibrant, prosperous, socialist utopia for which the revolutionaries of 1917 had hoped. Gorbachev emerges from these pages as...the brilliant statesman who almost single-handedly ended the Cold War, and he is the bumbling economic planner who, in going too far and not far enough, left his country in economic ruin. This is a fascinating tale and DeLuca tells it well." - Teddy J. Uldricks, Professor of History University of North Carolina at Asheville

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