About the Book

A Times History Book of the Year 2022

From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph

The 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 twentieth century history. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers.

To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.

Critical Praise

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Product Details

• ISBN: 9780008365035
• ISBN 10: 0008365032
• Imprint: William Collins
• On Sale: 05/11/2023
• Pages: 576
• List Price:22.99 CAD
• BISAC1 : HISTORY / Military / Biological & Chemical Warfare
• BISAC2 : HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century
• BISAC3 : HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union
• BISAC4 : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Military
• BISAC5 : HISTORY / Military / Nuclear Warfare

Max Hastings

Biography

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Other Works by Max Hastings

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  Operation Biting

  By Max Hastings

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  Abyss: World on the Brink, The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

  By Max Hastings

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  Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

  By Max Hastings