Abyss

A Times History Book of the Year 2022From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ¿the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis¿ Daily TelegraphThe 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.Max Hastings¿s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro¿s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev¿s Russia and Kennedy¿s America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twenti