A History of Our Profession (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. David Engerman has written an excellent book. He is an erudite scholar, capable of summarizing the writings of people on a great variety of topics. He has obviously done a great deal of work; he carried out a large number of interviews and read the writings of well-known economists, historians, linguists, and scholars of literature and politics. While he describes the ideas of individuals, he is also interested in institutional history. He is a remarkably fair-minded writer who does justice to the ideas of people with whom, I suspect, he disagrees. In fact, after reading his book I still cannot tell where he stands on many of the controversial issues of our profession. Graduate students could benefit from reading this book when preparing for their comprehensive examination, because they would get a fairly good overview of a large variety of fields and become acquainted with the work of the important figures in our profession over the last two generations. This book encourages my generation (I received my Ph.D. in 1967) to examine our intellectual autobiography.