RaveThe New RepublicCuadros contributes greatly to ongoing debates about the preservation of the Amazon and the place of native people in democracies besieged by rapacious reactionary forces.
Serhii Plokhy
RaveThe New RepublicSerhii Plokhy has written a new account of the incident that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war ... he brings a deep understanding of Soviet political reality to the oft-told story of those 13 dicey days in October 1962, a narrative still defined much more by Camelot than the Kremlin in the popular imagination. The result is a magisterial work based on a bevy of U.S. and Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents. The perspective Plokhy provides exposes the perverse incentives that fueled dangerous nuclear power plays during the Cold War and, he suggests, beyond. Understanding how the most famous near miss of the Cold War was peacefully resolved can, he believes, bring us some reassurance—and perhaps offer crucial life-saving insights ... Plokhy is more interested in the \'ideological hubris and overriding political agendas\' that the missile crisis laid bare, along with demonstrations of \'poor judgment often due to the lack of good intelligence, and cultural misunderstandings.\'
Vincent Bevins
RaveThe New RepublicIn brisk but assured prose, Bevins recounts how Brazil and Indonesia became \'the best allies that Washington’s foreign interventions had ever created.\' The ruinous legacy of these policies, more than the specific acts of unspeakable violence that they engendered, is the book’s main subject ... Bevins is not the first to note that the Cold War frequently burned hot in the Third World, but he excels at showing the human costs of that epic ideological struggle.
