Overview

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.

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9780008364991

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR ABYSS: 'Brilliantly told... compelling... Hastings has cleverly woven the story together from all sides describing them in dramatic, almost hour by hour detail... this is a scary book. Hastings sees little evidence that today's leaders understand each other any better than they did in 1962' Sunday Times 'Grabs from the get-go... the moments in which the world teetered on the brink of total annihilation... come alive as they would if this were the very best fiction... Hastings is a writer in the permanent prime of his time... Abyss is up there with the best... packed full of mordant humour, perfectly pitched amid the lunacy of mankind facing imminent destruction' Justin Webb, Mail on Sunday 'The heart-stopping story of the missile crisis ...told ...with the narrative verve and panache that is Hastings's hallmark...a brilliant, beautifully constructed and thrilling re-assessment of the most perilous moment in history' Saul David, Daily Telegraph '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' Gerald DeGroot, Times 'A gripping retelling of those weeks of brinkmanship, reckless gambles, gung-ho generals and a thuggish USSR leader bullying a 'weak president'' Sun 'Superb... reads like a thriller as the gripping drama of the Cold War power politics plays out behind closed doors in Washington, Moscow and Havana' Daily Mail 'Magisterial... chilling' Daily Express '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

PRAISE FOR MAX HASTINGS'S BESTSELLING HISTORY VIETNAM 'Masterpiece ... manages with great skill to combine the accumulation of strategic and political disaster with the real experience of those fighting on the ground' Antony Beevor, Spectator 'Will surely set the benchmark for years to come... This may be his best ... Exhaustively researched and superbly written, it is both a balanced account of how and why the war unfolded as it did, and a gripping narrative on what it was like to take part...History as it should be: objective, immersive and compelling' Daily Telegraph, 5* 'Magnificent... One by one, the sacred canons of right and left are obliterated. The war is laid bare, with all its uncomfortable truths exposed' The Times 'Powerful and chilling... Hastings is masterful at describing the conditions faced by young American soldiers... [he] is second to none in his ability to describe military strategy with a clarity that makes things entirely understandable to the layman' Mail on Sunday, 5* 'An altogether magnificent historical narrative' Tim O'Brien 'A masterpiece' Frank Scotton 'Magnificent, his best work ... full of extraordinary and compelling detail and thoroughly informed by his own personal experience of so much of the war. It's written in unputdownable style, with a dispassionate, liberal-minded understanding of the detail of the war, which draws on testimony from every side and doesn't favour anyone. I've never read a better history of the wars in Vietnam, and it's hard to see how anyone will be able to improve on this' John Simpson 'Neophytes and experts alike will find Hastings's book stimulating, informative - and above all, riveting' New Statesman 'This fabulous work offers up a gut-wrenching glimpse of the reality of war' The Sun, 5* 'Impressive... A fast-paced, poignant and eye-opening read' Literary Review

Author Information

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

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