"Condensing the Cold War shifts the focus on geopolitics and international relations in America from the study of political elites to the imagined geographies of popular culture. Joanne Sharp exposes the links that the Digest forged between the individual reader and the destiny of the United States, especially those relating to the Soviet Union, a Cold War enemy whose character the magazine is often credited with helping to create. Sharp shows how the changing representations of the communist threat to the United States depicted in the Digest produced a particular image of Americanness for its readers and reveals how readers were drawn into the developing story to become complicit subjects of this political identity."--BOOK JACKET.