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Zusatztext **Kirkus Reviews "The Best Books of 2020" ** “In this riveting book, Sherwin provides a fresh and thrilling account of the Cuban Missile Crisis and also puts it into historical perspective. With great new material, he shows the effect of nuclear arms on global affairs, starting with the decision to bomb Hiroshima. It is a fascinating work of history that is very relevant to today’s politics.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci “Engrossing . . . Forget everything you think you know about how close the world came to nuclear war, then read this superb new book that completely upends the mythology of those critical weeks in October 1962 . . . From the opening pages [Sherwin] draws the reader into the immediacy of the Crisis . . . Should make everyone who reads it and was born after October 1962 extremely thankful to be alive.” —Jerry D. Lenaburg, New York Journal of Books "Intricately detailed, vividly written, and nearly Tolstoyan in scope, Sherwin’s account reveals just how close the Cold War came to boiling over. History buffs will be enthralled.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A fresh examination of the Cuban missile crisis and its wider historical context, showing how the U.S. avoided nuclear war . . . Makes it clear how national leaders bumbled through the crisis, avoiding nuclear Armageddon through modest amounts of wisdom mixed with plenty of machismo, delusions, and serendipity . . . A fearfully convincing case that avoiding nuclear war ‘is contingent on the world’s dwindling reservoir of good luck.’” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Examines nuclear policy as it evolved in the Cold War, culminating with the chillingly suspenseful week-long drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis . . . Grounded in an exceptional and up-to-date knowledge of the military, diplomatic, and individual components of American and Soviet politics.” —Mark Levine, Booklist (starred review) “In Gambling with Armageddon Martin J. Sherwin summarizes the ‘official’ narrative of the ‘thirteen days’ as follows. Members of ExComm, through ‘their careful consideration of the challenge, their firmness in the face of terrifying danger, and their wise counsel,’ steered the world to a peaceful resolution of a potentially civilization-ending conflict. Nothing, he writes, ‘could be further from the truth.’” —Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker “One of our ablest chroniclers of the larger-than-life personalities and lasting environmental effects of the nuclear age.” — Marc Ambinder, The American Scholar “A thrilling account of the tension-filled days when the world teetered on the edge of nuclear apocalypse. Drawing on new sources, Martin Sherwin shows how the Cuban missile crisis grew out of the nuclear sabre-rattling of the Cold War, going all the way back to the early confrontations between Truman and Stalin. No one is better equipped to tell this story than Sherwin, who has devoted his life to thinking about Armageddon, as witnessed by his ground-breaking biography of Robert Oppenheimer. A splendid accomplishment and a great read!” —Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War "Gambling with Armageddon will have a powerful and lasting impact because it does things that no other study does in an area that could not be more significant. Sherwin makes clear that the Cuban missile crisis was not really an aberration but an unsurprising outcome of the history and psychology world leaders brought to the weapons. We also learn how much mere chance—good luck—saved us from world-ending catastrophe. Sherwin has written a book that matters deeply, and has made an elegantly convincing argument for the abolition of nucle...
