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The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962
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About This Book
Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded. In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. Combining in-depth research with Hasting's well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today. Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.
Reviews
"In his latest, he thoroughly explores a fraught set of circumstances that almost lead to World War III."
"A compelling narrative."
"This author has always had a talent for drawing vivid characters, and his various sympathies are clear throughout the narrative."
"This was wrong on both counts."
"As Hastings shows so well in Abyss, those who have downplayed its importance – with, for example, the line of argument that neither side wanted a nuclear war, so neither would have dared make a first strike – underestimate the level to which 'both sides groped through… under huge misapprehensions' ..."
"Judgments are delivered adroitly, not with a sledgehammer."
"Flashes of color enliven sober warnings about the need for world leaders who can sift through multiple sources of information and back down from a fight when the cost is too great."
"Hastings is generous to a fault in acknowledging the work others have done before him, yet he is the right person to tell this story: he has few peers as an expert in military and diplomatic history, and few historians have his ability to write a narrative that is at once deeply researched, incisively intelligent and compulsively readable."
"Award winning journalist and historian Hastings masterfully places the Cuban Missile Crisis within the tensions and relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in their Cold War context."
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