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Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets' or the Americans' part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Prelude: 17 November -- Act 1. Recto 1918-1945 -- 1. Kafkárna -- Love Letters -- Ratcatcher's Beauties -- Language Games -- German Prague! -- A Little Bit of Sulfur, a Little Bit of Hell -- 2. A Modern Woman -- Am I, above All, a Czech? -- Enriching the Old, Domestic Repertoire -- Moscow-The Border -- The Refuse of the Past -- Hundreds of Thousands Seeking No-Man's-Land -- Youthful Calves in White Kneesocks -- 3. Love and Theft -- Poldi Kladno -- From Taliesin to Tokyo -- The Sorrows of Poor Fricek -- An Ashram in Pondicherry -- Dugway Proving Ground, Utah -- The Atomic Bomb Dome -- 4. But Miss, We Can't Help It -- The Last Train Out -- 15 March 1939 -- Smetanesque -- The Age of the Concentration Camp -- 5. The Void at the Core of Things -- Mendelssohn Is on the Roof -- Hitler's Hangman -- But Lidice Is in Europe -- Monumental Details -- 6. Avant-garde and Kitsch -- The He and the She of It -- A Used Bookstore of Dead Styles -- Manon the Sinner -- The Strongholds of Sleep -- The World in which We Live -- Act 2. Verso 1938-1989 -- 7. As Time Goes By -- A Citizen of the World -- The Usual Suspects -- Transit -- The Strip Street -- Here's Looking at You, Kid! -- A Première in Terezín -- 8. The Cleansing of the Homeland -- Why Should We Not Rejoice? -- This Sweet Apocalypse -- Forward, Backward Not a Step! -- Victorious February -- Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards -- 9. The Lyrical Age -- A Dream of Meissen Breasts -- Torn Dolls -- Danse Macabre in Smíchov -- Country Music -- The Tender Barbarians -- A Pearl at the Bottom of a Chasm -- 10. Midcentury Modern -- National Artists -- An Age-Old Checkerboard of Modernity -- Art of Another Kind -- The Brussels Style -- The Magician's Lantern -- If a Thousand Clarinets -- 11. The Prague Spring -- The King of May -- We Want Light, We Want More Light!.

Intro -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Illiteracy Myths -- The Literacy Spectrum -- A Multi-Disciplinary Approach -- Splendour and Misery of the Signature Test -- What Was Illiteracy? -- Chapter 2: The War on Illiteracy -- How Illiteracy Got Its Stigma -- Illiteracy, Orality and 'Backwardness' -- Campaigns Against Illiteracy -- Stamping Out Illiteracy: USSR and Nicaragua -- Paulo Freire -- Chapter 3: Illiteracy and Power -- The Oral and the Illiterate -- Denying the Right to Literacy -- Parental Censorship -- Choosing Illiteracy -- Chapter 4: Illiteracy and Schooling -- Illiteracy Panics -- The Limitations of Formal Schooling -- Becoming Literate Without Schools -- The Demand for Literacy -- Chapter 5: The Literary Culture of the Illiterate -- The City as a Text -- Reading and Listening -- Delegated Writing -- World War One as a National Literacy Test -- Illiterates Count -- Invisible Illiteracy -- Chapter 6: The Literacy Continuum -- Historicising Illiteracy -- Imperfect Literacies -- The Example of China -- Select Bibliography -- Index.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Series Preface -- Introduction Audrey Horning -- 1 Objecthood Mary C. Beaudry -- 2 Technology Colin Rynne -- 3 Economic Objects Christina J. Hodge -- 4 Everyday Objects Beverly Straube -- 5 Art Katy Barrett -- 6 Architecture Adrian Green -- 7 Bodily Objects Diana DiPaolo Loren -- 8 Object Worlds Jonas Monié Nordin -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

Intro -- Title Page -- SECTION I: SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST -- Chapter One: Survival of the Kindest -- Kin Altruism -- Reciprocal Altruism -- How We Got Out of Africa -- The Morality Instinct -- Chapter Two: The Psychology of Morality -- Understanding Our Aversion to Killing Innocent Strangers -- Using Equivalent Retaliation -- Testing Your Instinctive Fairness -- Signalling Social Status -- Responding to Peer Pressure -- Chapter Three: How Collaboration Evolved into Conflict -- The Influence of Population Growth and Expansion -- The Paleontological Evidence of Increasing Warfare -- From Kindness to Competition -- Making Peace in a Time of War -- From Partners to Property -- The Rise of Patriarchy -- Chapter Four: The Struggle for a More Open Society -- Female Influence on Religious Freedom 1700 Years Ago -- Blaming the Sack of Rome on Female Sexuality -- An Idealistic Philosopher in Alexandria -- Fake News about Women and Witchcraft in The Hammer of the Witches -- Isabella, Queen of Castile, Founds the Spanish Inquisition -- Queen Mother Catherine de Medici Agrees to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre -- Queen Elizabeth I Sanctions a Scorched-earth Campaign in Northern Ireland -- SECTION II: THE DARK SIDE -- Chapter Five: The Paradox of Cruelty -- Living with Our Own Cruelty -- The Power of Bias -- Manipulating Our Instincts To Punish Wrongdoing -- The Dark Side of Reciprocal Altruism -- Blame-storming and Appeasement in Times of Crisis -- Cruelty, Glory and Cognitive Dissonance -- Rationalising -- Dehumanising -- Distancing -- Where Unfettered Cognitive Biases Lead -- Weaponising Reason -- Chapter Six: From Passion to Persecution -- Christians Loving their Enemies by Killing for God -- From Love to Penitence and Pilgrimage -- The Crusades: Absolution through Holy War -- Martin Luther and Reform as the Instrument of Conquest -- The Censorship Wars.

Intro -- Introduction -- Part 1 -- Birth of the Norman admiralty (1086-1095) -- Christodulo and George of Antioch, the first great admirals (1097-1152) -- Part 2 -- William I and the power of Maio (1156-1160) -- Part 3 -- The chancellery of Stephan of Perche and the disappearance of the admiralty (1162-1170) -- Re-birth of the admiralty (1177-1189) -- German invasion and the struggle for the throne (1189-1197) -- Conclusions -- Appendix -- Bibliography.

"Americans have disabled the government's ability to solve even basic problems, making us vulnerable to the most dangerous demagogue ever to pretend to the White House. Kurt Andersen shows how the masterminds of the economic right rode an unprecedented wave of nostalgia by dressing up their harsh new rich-get-richer system in patriotic old-time drag, making it their mission to take over the government for their purposes alone and convincing the country that the mid-century consensus about the function of the American government was all wrong. Only a writer with Andersen's crackling energy, deep intelligence, and ability to see complex systems with clarity could make such a vital book both intellectually formidable and completely entertaining. In his diagnosis of what happened and what it means for us today, Andersen spares no one, committing to a pinpointing of his own boomer generation as accessories to the great dismantling of the American experiment"--