The Shadow of War: A Novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis is the next thrilling and tense historical setting for bestselling author Jeff Shaara in The Shadow of War. In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to unleashing a nuclear holocaust when the Soviets installed offensive nuclear missiles in Communist Cuba.
While everyone knows how the story ends, Shaara’s meticulous research and established storytelling chops put the reader at the center of the storm. Shaara frames the story through the viewpoints of three principal characters: Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General and President John F. Kennedy’s most trusted advisor, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev, and fictional Joseph Russo, professor of English at Florida State University, a family man who witnesses the looming catastrophe from newspapers and nightly television news with his wife and two children.
Beginning with the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, Shaara sets up JFK in Khruschev’s eyes as vulnerable to Soviet expansion, thereby setting in motion his plans to bolster fellow communist Fidel Castro’s regime from further U.S. invasion or interference. Shaara follows history closely in the closed-door Executive Committee meetings, where senior U.S. officials and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff battle it out over the best plan to remove the missiles: “quarantine” or blockade Cuba from future shipments, conduct a limited strike against the missile sites, or invade Cuba altogether. Shaara mined the substantial documentary record to inform these scenes, and he takes a sympathetic view of both Kennedy and Khruschev attempting to rein in hotheaded advisors eager to go to war.
The Shadow of War revisits this dicey episode of Cold War brinksmanship with taut writing and historic authenticity. Shaara fans will not want to miss this one.
