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Title: The Cuban Missile Crisis (Cornerstones of Freedom) by Susan Maloney Clinton ISBN: 0-516-06667-6 Publisher: Scholastic Library Pub Pub. Date: 01 October, 1993 Format: School & Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.30

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent juvenile history of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Comment: Susan Maloney Clinton beings this juvenile history of "The Cuban Missile Crisis" quite dramatically, with the top-secret photographs taken by U.S. spy planes that revealed Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuban soil in October of 1962. She even has copies of the top-secret CIA memos confirming the missiles and showing their range included Washington, D.C. After a review of tensions between the United States and Soviet Union over Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Clinton covers the details of the crisis, focusing on the deliberations of EXCOM, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, that advised President Kennedy. Young readers will get an excellent sense for how the situation evolved, teetering closer to full out nuclear war before both sides found a way of backing away from the brink. If you have read Robert Kennedy's "Thirteen Days" or seen the film, then you will be impressed with how Clinton has distilled this complex crisis into this excellent book. My father was stationed at an Air Force Base in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I have always been interested in this particular chapter of American history.

This book is illustrated with black & white photographs taken during the crisis; I want to note that this is one of the most effective uses of contemporary photographs in the Cornerstones of Freedom series. The book comes full circle at the end, with photographs of Soviet missiles being loaded for transport out of Cuba, and ends with Kennedy signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. After the crisis Kennedy and Khrushchev met to discuss the treaty and agreed to install a hot line between the two capitals. Clinton ends with Khrushchev's praise for Kennedy following the President's assassination in 1963. Teachers should point out to their students that Khrushchev was ousted from his leadership position within a few years, and both sides in the Cold War had lost the leaders who avoided nuclear war at a pivotal moment in history. You have to wonder if detente could have started years earlier if they had both remained on the world's stage.

I am a great admirer of the Cornerstones of Freedom series, which looks at not only events in American History but people, places, objects and periods. Teachers and students alike can use these volumes to great advantage to get beyond the limited consideration of such things in standard history textbooks.