The Cold War Within the Cold War (Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts) (Book Review‪)‬

David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. ix + 459 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0195324860. $34.95. Know Your Enemy was all the talk of the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) convention. In scenes worthy of Vanity Fair, groups of graduate students and junior scholars huddled around single copies of the book, scanning indexes for names and reading aloud passages about their favorite and less-than-favorite senior colleagues. At the same time, a few more seasoned scholars could be glimpsed sitting quietly in dark corners imbibing the book, alternating facial expressions between the academic smirk and carefully concealed looks of injured vanity. I only received a copy of the book some time after the convention, but if I had purchased the book there, surely I would have carried it into the privacy of my hotel room.