Today Amberly received the four books on the Cuban Missile Crisis from the library. One of them, The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of World War III, appears to be a quick overview of the whole Cuban Missile Crisis, which would be good because the book won't be as boring as a longer book on the same subject, but this book is the only one of the four which doesn't have some sort of bibliography of references, so Amberly didn't think it would be the best book to use as a source for our essay. The other books are quite a bit longer. The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of World War III has only 29 pages with nice large print and pictures, whereas the others have 88 pages, 102 pages and 118 pages respectively. The longest of the three books, Thirteen Days/Ninety Miles: The Cuban Missile Crisis, seems to be the most interesting, written with a flair that makes it seem more like a novel that someone might actually read, as an example, here is an excerpt from the beginning of chapter 5: "Until the telephones began to ring that Monday, October 15, it was a typical early fall evening in Washington. Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, took his call in the butler's pantry next to the State Department's formal dining room. He was hosting an official dinner for West Germany's foreign minister. A few blocks away, the assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, Edwin Martin, was at the National Press Club addressing members of Sigma Delta Chi, the journalism society. As he told the assembled guests there was no threat from Cuba—'The military build up is basically defensive in nature'—the phone rang." This book is also quite long and Amberly isn't sure she'll have the time to read it all, but it looks like the most entertaining way to get information on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The other two books, The Cuban Missile Crisis and The Cuban Missile Crisis: To the Brink of War (wow, people were really unoriginal with their titles) are just (approximately) one hundred pages of "this happened, then that happened and at first everyone thought this, and nobody predicted that that would happen". So, they are pretty much hair-pulling boringness for one hundred pages. But they do all have a nice little timeline at the end that will probably be useful. Amberly plans on reading these books (or at least parts of them) to collect some more information on the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as doing some research online.
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