What would be your top suggestions for books on the Cold War? No specific time period or geographical location.

Thanks

Legacy of Ashes is a good one. It's on the CIA but a huge chunk of it deals with the Cold War

-"Sword and the Shield" which is based on the Mitrokhin Archive. It documents a fair amount of the KGB's activities during the cold war. It names names of KGB spies and collaborators in the west, plans for sabotage in case of war, etc etc.

-"The Bridge at Andau" by James Michener. About the Hungarian revolution of 1956.

-"The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties" self explanatory.

-"The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

-And to give a view from the other side "Che Guevara A Revolutionary Life" by Jon Lee Anderson. Basically a hagiography about the patron saint of the left. As might be expected, full of sheet in many places, yet it does give some insight into the Cuban revolution.

+1 for the Bridge at Andau and I would add Truman's Memoirs for the beginnings of it.

My favorite is Red Storm Rising.

A lot of good ones listed already but I loved this one:

Transit Point Moscow
Book by Bernard Asbell and Gerald Amster
Gerald Amster recounts how his thirst for adventure led to imprisonment in a Soviet labor camp and describes his escape and the six months he spent in a Moscow safe house Google Books
(1985)

It's an easy read.

No Cold War reading list is complete without John Lewis Gaddis! His book The Cold War: A New History is required reading for a solid overview by one of the best historians in the field.

Try Skunkworks by Ben Rich, about the top secret program at Lockheed-Martin that developed the U-2, the SR-71 and the stealth fighter. The stories about how the USSR tried to cope with the U-2 are amazing.

I just read Berlin 1961 which I liked a lot. Arguably the zenith of the cold war.