Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The authors of this fine book have provided us with an insightful and comprehensive look at how the world was nearly subjected to the catastrophic events of a global thermonuclear war.
Rather than simply providing us with a simple chronology or details of the individual events making up the crisis, Normal Polmar & John Gresham have combined to provide us with a solid explanatory volume of how this crisis nearly devolved into something akin to the end of the world as it was then known.
Providing details based on interviews from participants in the crisis and on recently declassified documents, Polmar & Gresham provide us with details not before seen, but critical in understanding the crisis.
The book does not simply explain the crisis from either the American or the Soviet side, but instead looks at it from three different viewpoints - the Americans, the Soviets, and the Cubans (primarily Fidel Castro). This makes for an enlightening & very useful study of this critical period in Cold War history.
I especially enjoyed the final chapter of the book - the lessons learned from Operation Anadyr (the Soviet code name for the installation of nuclear weapons in Cuba). I thought that the ananlysis presented in this chapter tied all of the previously written history together into a nice package. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a solid explanation of the Missile Crisis and just how close we really did come to global destruction.
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