Reading any account of the crisis, much less one as accessible and involving as this crafted by Hastings, always provokes a graveyard chill ... This author has always had a talent for drawing vivid characters, and his various sympathies are clear throughout the narrative.
Until recently, the disturbing truth about what actually happened 60 years ago has been hidden in often inaccessible academic studies, leaving the public to shelter in cozy ignorance. Enter Hastings, a rock of probity and good sense. He’s combined his investigative skills with his flair for storytelling to produce the most gripping narrative of the crisis I’ve yet encountered. His story unfolds, as it should, as a frightening but hopelessly addictive narrative of 13 nerve-wracking days when the world teetered above an abyss ... While Hastings accepts that Kennedy’s provocations of Castro and Khrushchev helped to bring this crisis into being, he also acknowledges his brilliance at solving it ... Hastings writes with great confidence and wisdom about events he lived through. As he demonstrates, age and experience are great advantages when writing history. As we grow older, we collect more material and become more astute at analysing it. Supremely self-assured, Hastings writes as he pleases, occasionally straying from his path to follow whims — things he just happens to find interesting. Judgments are delivered adroitly, not with a sledgehammer.
Hastings lays bare, with chilling clarity, the ease with which political theatre and bluster could well have escalated into a scenario of mutually assured destruction ... This is in no way to diminish the dangerousness of the Cuban missile crisis. 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' ... provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.
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. Abyss is as tight and smart as any account, and will earn pride of place even on a shelf already packed with books about the crisis ... Perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution is its reassessment of the key figures, for this really was a historical moment driven by personality, which turned on individual decisions.
... notable historian Hastings provides a narrative more coherent than would have been experienced by the principals, emphasizing how limited information could have led to disaster, such as when the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev proposed to base nuclear missiles in Cuba as his military assured could be done secretly and without provoking the U.S. This was wrong on both counts. Once the crisis broke, the Americans, led by President John Kennedy, groped to discern the intent of Khrushchev’s gambit, which, as Hastings notes, was not even clear to the Soviet leader himself. When exposed by Kennedy’s October 22 revelation of the Soviet missiles, Khrushchev immediately began a week-long retreat, during which Kennedy was under immense pressure to invade Cuba. Replete with astute characterizations of participants in the crisis, Hastings’ able account registers the peril humanity then faced and still faces in a world of competitive, nuclear-armed countries.
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. The tense and suspenseful atmosphere interweaving the negotiations and political developments as they occurred between Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. are palpable in this elegantly written account. The personalities of all major players, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and other minor diplomats and government officials are all fully realized in this book. The author does an excellent job of incorporating the views of other foreign governments, such as Great Britain and France, who recognized the gravity of the situation but viewed Berlin as the focal point of the Cold War. Based on extensive archival research, including in the UK, this eminently readable account provides a nice, single volume overview of the Cuban Missile Crisis ... Recommended for readers interested in this specific crisis and Cold War history in general.
In his long, distinguished career, Hastings has masterfully covered both world wars, the Korean War, and Vietnam. In his latest, he thoroughly explores a fraught set of circumstances that almost lead to World War III. He sets the scene with a highly illuminating description of the Cold War world in 1960 ... Hastings does not hide his contempt for Khrushchev’s decision to send atomic weapons ... The author’s painfully insightful conclusion credits Kennedy with brilliant statesmanship but adds that most successors would have chosen war ... The definitive account of a brief yet frightening period in global history.
... engrossing ... Hastings draws sharp personality profiles of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, and their top-level advisers, and expertly mines archival records to recreate the contemporaneous rationale for their decision-making, even when it looks foolish or reckless in hindsight. He also expands beyond the 'pivotal thirteen days' when the crisis reached its height, providing essential context in cogent discussions of the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet space program, and more. 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. This riveting history speaks clearly to the present moment.
