As Susan Carruthers acknowledges, the captive narrative has “occupied a privileged place in the American imaginary as a fixture of national speech, symbology, and statuary” (4). In Cold War Captives Carruthers offers a meticulously well-researched account of how the traditional American fondness for the captivity narrative played out in the context of the early Cold War. Carruthers argues persuasively for the central role of stories of captivity and imprisonment, liberation and escape in the construction of the “cold war consensus.”

Carruthers's case studies demonstrate the extent to which the captive narrative lent itself to the articulation of other Cold War themes and anxieties. The rejection by twenty-three American POWs in Korea of repatriation to the United States resulted in claims that they had been brainwashed, which in turn sparked a debate on the lack of mental toughness amongst American men. The case of US businessman Robert Vogeler, sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment in Hungary after he confessed to spying for the United States, was used in the US as fodder for those seeking to demonstrate the impotency and weakness of the US State Department, and, more broadly, the failure of those in government to exercise US power to protect its citizens abroad. As Carruthers relates, Vogeler's confinement “fit into a pattern of humiliating incarcerations,” in which the fate of US hostages abroad illustrated wider concerns over the decline of US global power. As with the US hostages held in Iran (1979–81), the seeming inability of the United States to take care of its own citizens fed criticisms of the national leadership for their incompetence, weakness, lack of will and failure of nerve. Carruthers explains, “For those minded to seek it, Vogeler's imprisonment provided further evidence of Washington's inability (or unwillingness) to prevail in the cold war.” Vogeler's son's plaintive protest, “They wouldn't dare do anything to my daddy – he's an American,” reflected the construction of the captive as the symbol of national power – or lack of it. The coverage in the US press of Vogeler's photogenic family also reinforced narratives of the importance of the family unit in American life. As with the refusal of the Soviet Union to grant exit visas to the Soviet wives of Americans, captive narratives here went beyond stories of physical imprisonment, and dwelt on the ruthless drive of the Communist states to disrupt and separate bonds of emotional kinship and attachment.

The case of Robert Vogeler is just one example of the stories Carruthers uses to deliver a complex, absorbing and insightful interrogation of the captive narrative in the early Cold War. Carruthers's subject matter is wide-ranging, and includes discussion of American prisoners of war in Korea, the complexity of the US position on escapees and asylum seekers from the Eastern Bloc and US attacks on the Soviet gulags, alongside the stories of individuals such as Robert Vogeler and Oksana Kasenkina, a Soviet schoolteacher whose self-defenestration from the third-floor window of the Soviet consulate in New York made her a cause célèbre amongst American journalists. Carruthers traces stories of complexity with admirable dexterity and fluency. Cold War Captives explores both the “lived experience” of Cold War captives and the use of the captive narrative as a wider cultural allegory, seeking to explore the way in which “the rhetorical opposition between slavery and freedom took shape around concrete struggles over repatriation, defection, forced labour, incarceration, and mind control.” It is a quick and easy exercise to find numerous examples of the framing of the dichotomous positioning of “freedom and slavery” in US political rhetoric in the early Cold War; the Truman Doctrine, NSC-68 and the speeches of President Eisenhower all echo with ringing endorsements of American freedom and Soviet slavery. It is a significant achievement to have traced and explored this much-cited Cold War contest so carefully through the stories and case studies that made the captive narrative central to the building of the US Cold War consensus.