Michael Beschloss on the Cold War: The Crisis Years, Mayday, and At the Highest Levels

· Open Road Media
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About this ebook

Riveting accounts of the Cold War power struggles from the New York Times–bestselling author and "nation's leading presidential historian" ( Newsweek).

The Crisis Years: A national bestseller on the complex relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, this "definitive" history covers the tumultuous period from 1960 through 1963 when the Berlin Wall was built, and the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war (David Remnick, The New Yorker).

"Impressively researched and engrossingly narrated." — Los Angeles Times

Mayday: On May Day 1960, Soviet forces downed a CIA U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers, two weeks before a crucial summit. This forced President Dwight Eisenhower to decide whether to admit to Nikita Khrushchev—and the world—that he had secretly ordered the flight. Drawing on previously unavailable CIA documents, diaries, and letters, as well as the recollections of Eisenhower's aides, Beschloss reveals the full high-stakes drama.

"One of the best stories yet written about just how those grand men of diplomacy and intrigue conducted our business." — Time

At the Highest Levels: Cowritten with Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels exposes the complex negotiations between President George Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. In December 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen, millions across the Eastern Bloc were enjoying new freedoms, and the USSR was crumbling. But a peaceful end to the Cold War was far from assured, requiring an unlikely partnership, as the leaders of rival superpowers had to look beyond the animosities of the past and embrace an uncertain future.

"Intimate and utterly absorbing." — The New York Times

About the author

Michael Beschloss is a historian and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books, including Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980); Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair (1986); The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (1991); The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany (2002); and Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989 (2007). Born in Chicago and educated at Williams College and Harvard University, Beschloss is a contributor to NBC News, PBS NewsHour, and the New York Times, and has been called "the nation's leading presidential historian" by Newsweek. He lives with his wife in Washington, DC.

Strobe Talbott is the president of the Brookings Institution and the author of twelve books, including Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control (1984); At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993), written with Michael Beschloss; The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (2002); and The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (2008). A former Time columnist and Washington bureau chief, Talbott served as deputy secretary of state for seven years and was the architect of the Clinton administration's policy toward Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union. He translated and edited two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs in the early 1970s and founded the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2001. Talbott currently lives in Washington, DC.

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