One Minute to Midnight by Michael Dobbs presents a shocking account of the political standoff between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dobbs, a Washington Post reporter specializing in communist countries, presents the entire Crisis in order down to the minute in most occasions. Examined from the Russian, American, and Cuban perspectives, the book “masterly” creates one of the most precise timelines and best written works focused on closest our world has been to nuclear war.
Dobbs is an ideal author for this book after experiencing the thought process and mentality of both superpowers in the confrontation. After growing up in Russia throughout his childhood, he has spent many years working in America for…show more content… Filled with exact dates, Dobbs has put the entire web of events into a single well organized chain. Dobbs alternates extremely well between all three main points of view in the story (Russians, Americans, and Cubans) and is able to show the extreme complexity of divisions and secret groups working beneath the surface of all three countries. The book itself is a thrilling adventure, strange for a non-fictional historical book. The book reads reasonably easily and seems more like an action movie than real historical events. The amount of research Dobbs put into the book pays off extremely well in the fact that he can create dialogs and personal thoughts of the characters that are essentially identical to actual events. Dobbs also lays bare many details that were not known by government intelligence, let alone regular people. Two perfect examples of this is the short range missiles present on Cuba and the location of some missile storage sites. Before Dobb’s produced this book, the US had no clue of the presence of the short range missiles and had passed over an actual missile location and focused on a former molasses factory being used to transfer and store missile