The Collapse of the Soviet Union (Milestones in Modern World History)

This curriculum-based series is ideal for high school students writing reports and studying these world events.

Titles in this series are bolstered by biographical sketches, illustrations, photographs, excerpts from primary source documents, and first-person narratives.

Milestones in Modern World History introduces students to seminal historical events that helped shape the modern world. This series presents both an in-depth look at the event and those people who not only played an integral part in making it significant, but also those who were ultimately affected by its consequences.

Gr 9 Up–Both books suffer from major errors, omissions, misspellings, internal inconsistencies, and poor organization. Many footnotes are incorrect, with an unusually high number of citations in D-Day mangled or taken out of context. Collapse has no maps, a deplorable oversight; D-Day contains only one, and it's small and incomplete. Although both titles include chronologies and time lines, the latter are merely highlights from the former, and thus redundant. The lack of glossaries is a definite drawback. Both authors overuse the passive voice. Davenport plunges right in to D-Day preparations with no explanation, assuming basic familiarity with World War II. He makes a thrilling military event tedious, dull, and overwhelmingly confusing, and concludes on a decidedly negative note. Of numerous titles on D-Day, the best for this age is R. Conrad Stein's The World War II D-Day Invasion in American History (Enslow, 2004). Darraj uses five of nine chapters to review Russian history from the 800s through the early 1980s. She dramatically begins with Reagan's “Tear down this [Berlin] wall” speech while ignoring his far more influential “evil empire” reference and repeatedly and annoyingly defers to scholars and historians for unimportant quotes or items that are common knowledge.Ann W. Moore, Schenectady County Public Library, NY
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