The Abyss

Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962

By: Max Hastings

Narrated by: Max Hastings, John Hopkins

Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history—the Cuban Missile Crisis—providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.

In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century—the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis—America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors.

Combining in-depth research with Hasting’s well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today.

Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.

Max NEVER Disappoints!

Content, perspective and insights are excellent as is the writing, pace. An enlightening listen that will amaze and terrify.

Brilliant.

No better book on this topic. Great detail you won’t go to jail for checking the mail if you go by rail or sail in a gale it’s quite a take it’s the final nail in the hail at Yale without kale without wail without a vail but you won’t get bail

interesting but

Please present history with coloring with personal politics. Lots of good information - lots of holes filled in. But personal politics is off putting.

This book contains All the actual facts of the of The Cuban missile crisis.

This is the first book that included the exchange of our Jupiter missile sites in Turkey, Greece and Italy for the Russian missiles in Cuba that was actually was the actions that ended the "Cuba Missile Crisis"!

Must read.

Classic on strategic patience, risk and leadership during a deadly crisis. Lessons endure up to today.