On the Brink

In this post—Cold War world, Americans worry more about terrorism than the atomic bomb, more about Third World despots than the Red menace. But back in 1962, for six days, it really looked as if nuclear war was imminent. The Cuban missile crisis scared people stiff, including a seven-year-old boy in Illinois. "My memory of it was similar to my memory of tornadoes," says Michael Beschloss, today a respected historian (Mayday, Kennedy & Roosevelt). In his latest book, The Crisis Years (HarperCollins), Beschloss brings back to life the gripping drama of misunderstandings and miscalculations in Kennedy's White House and Khrushchev's Kremlin that brought the superpowers to the edge of disaster.

ELISE O'SHAUGHNESSY