Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

Product Information

Early on in the crisis, almost everyone, Kennedy included, agreed to bomb strategic sites and invade, which would likely lead to war.

Pilar Quintana has created a powerful story that contrasts with the hopeless and doomed atmosphere that surrounds the protagonist. Zeno renounces a comfortable career in the priesthood and leaves home to find truth at the age of 20. 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. Claudia is an eight-year-old girl living with her parents, her namesake mother married to her much older father who runs a supermarket. 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’ Observer --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.An anthology of classic short stories to evoke the sensation of something heavy scraping its way up the stairs, or a granite-cold hand on your shoulder. We can only be thankful that, in spite of his recklessness, Khrushchev was wise enough not to turn over control of nuclear weapons to Castro. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies.

Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides, most interestingly from little-known Cuban sources previously unused in American, Russian or European accounts. But as the journalist and historian Max Hastings reminds us in Abyss, relations between China, Russia and the US are as fractious now as ever. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy View image in fullscreen US president John F Kennedy with reporters in the White House during a televised speech to the nation about the blockade of Cuba in October 1962.For example, the famous about-turn of the Soviet ships as they approached the quarantine line north-east of Cuba could be described much more precisely, with on-shore and at-sea timings set against a detailed event-sequence.

As the young Zinaida and her sweetheart, the student Nemovetsky, stroll through the idyllic Russian countryside, their memories, dreams and thoughts about life and the future mingle in the evening breeze. The central figures—JFK in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin—are vividly revealed under stress.They help explain Soviet impulsiveness and recklessness in undertaking the Cuba venture at all, and the US hubris and arrogance that also contributed. Abyss, Pilar Quintana’s second novel to appear in English, is—like its predecessor The Bitch, also translated by Lisa Dillman—concerned with the fraught relationships between caregivers and their dependents. The affluent west of the city was prosperous and wealthy, but in contrast the east was an area of poverty, crime and disease. The result is a book to match the best things ever written on the subject in terms of immediacy and drama.