Showing posts with label Cuban Missile Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuban Missile Crisis. Show all posts

Monday, December 26, 2016

The Tunnels: Escapees Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill

A few weeks ago the Facebook page for The Tunnels shared this post: "Monica Crowley, Trump's pick today as a top National Security adviser, tweeted quite seriously "Walls work" a few months ago in standing in front of and endorsing Berlin Wall (with this photo of her below)." 

I had been reading The Tunnels for over a week when I saw this post. First, it was a nonsensible quip since the Berlin Wall was meant to keep citizens in East Germany, not to keep people from entering East Germany. And the wall that President-elect Trump has proposed is meant to keep foreigners out and not to keep Americans in America.

But it also showed how little we remember the Berlin Wall and the war zone it created--the young people, trapped in East Germany, desperate to join family or to continue their university studies, who tried to climb over the wall only to be shot by Soviet guards. East German boys were instructed to open fire on their own people; those who wanted to leave East Germany were made into criminals, and the East German news media covered up the truth behind the shootings. I don't see how the wall "worked."

Greg Mitchell's book is the story of the brave men and women dedicated to bringing people out form East Germany. It is the story of American newsmen who recognized the Berlin Wall was the story of the decade and who wanted to document the building of escape tunnels.

It is also the story of President Kennedy juggling the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Wall , endeavoring to prevent the nuclear war that some thought inevitable. If America attacked Cuba, and the Soviets attacked West Berlin, America would be drawn into nuclear war. Kennedy said of the military, "These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, ad do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell the that they were wrong." We were that close.

I was inspired by the selfless heroism of the men and women who risked their lives to help people escape East Germany. I was interested in how NBC and CBS fought to have their films of tunnel building and escapees brought to television. The White House used political pressure to suppress the films as damaging to American-Soviet relations. And I was appalled to read that in a 2009 poll early half of eastern Germans believed that the former state had 'more good sides than bad.'

I appreciate a book that is a great historical read that also sheds new light on events we are forgetting. It is even better when the subject is also of contemporary relevance. Walls have been going up across the world. Mitchell's book reminds us that walls do not solve our problems.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for an unbiased review.

Read more at:

http://gregmitchellauthor.com/books/the-tunnels-tr/the-tunnels-hc
https://www.facebook.com/The-Tunnels-1209730792433855/?fref=ts

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Thirteen Days in 1962: A Place We Knew Well by Susan Carol McCarthy


I am excited to be a part of my first Blog Tour! The publisher is hosting a Rafflecopter book giveaway. You can enter to receive one of five books here. 

I wanted to read A Place We Knew Well because it was a family drama set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was just ten years old in 1962 and had little understanding of world politics. I only knew that the adults in my life were fixated on the small black and white television screen and I knew they were frightened and worried. So I was worried. It was years later that I associated those days of fear with the Crisis.

Author Susan Carol McCarthy had her own memories of those thirteen days which inspired her to write this book. In her own words,
Where do books come from? I can’t speak for anyone else but, I know for sure, each of my three books grew out of very specific, very personal life events.
Inspiration for my first book, Lay That Trumpet In My Hands, arrived in a manila envelope containing clippings from The Orlando Sentinel, about a series of shocking race crimes that occurred in my central Florida hometown the year I was born, and an 8-page letter from my father saying, “Everyone in town knew the local KKK was involved, but no one was willing to do anything about it. I want you to hear, from the horse’s mouth, what I did and why.”
My second book, True Fires, grew out of the first, when I discovered, with my father’s help, the one time that the powerful racist sheriff in the county north of ours, a minor character in Trumpet, was forced, by strong women in his community, to do the right thing. It may have been the only time during his 28-year reign that the love of power capitulated to the power of love. I was genuinely inspired and privileged to tell that story. 
My third and newest book, A Place We Knew Well, was, in all seriousness, a nightmare—a recurring nightmare which I began to have soon after the events of September 11, 2001. In that dream, I was desperately afraid and powerless because the end of the world was at hand; but oddly, I was back in Florida with my parents and only ten/eleven years old. It took me awhile to realize that my subconscious had somehow melded my childhood memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the attack on the Twin Towers. Nearly four decades apart, my response to 9/11—shock and outrage, anxiety and fear—sent me back to a place that I, and anyone who was in Florida in late October 1962, knew all too well.
So many books have been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis from the political, military, and historians’ perspective. My inspiration was to capture what it was like to be an ordinary family trapped in the swath of that extraordinary, uniquely terrifying time. This book began as a way of setting down my own vivid childhood memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it would never have been finished without the generosity of so many others, whose shared recollections helped me grasp the larger, communal story. I’m truly grateful to them for their insights; and to you, kind reader, for your interest in this seminal time.  


The novel starts in 2009 with a woman returning to what was her father's gas station, now closed after his death. She notes the "lingering smells of petroleum, cigarettes, and strong coffee that, as long as I can remember, meant "Dad's work." She sees the cash register and the red-and-green Texaco star, finds her father's work jacket which smells of Old Spice and oil. The woman is jolted to October 1962, her senior year in high school.

The description of the station jolted me back to the gas station my father ran until 1963 when he sold the business. I wrote about The Station in a post you can read here.


For my family the Cuban Missile Crisis passed and was never spoke of. McCarthy was older at the time and her novel is a cathartic work to organize and control the experience of the events of October 19, 1962 and the thirteen days that followed.

Wes Avery runs his gas station in Orlando, Florida, not far from McCoy AFB. Wes was a navy pilot in WWII; he understands that unusual things are going on. Such as the arrival of  top-secret U-2s at the field and an alert of DEFCON 2, meaning imminent war with the Strategic Air Command.

His wife is active in promoting fall out shelters. She is frustrated and depressed, popping pills to fight a nervous breakdown. Wes had flown over Japan after the atomic bomb attack and saw the destruction. He knows there is no surviving an atomic war.

Meantime, Wes's daughter is on the Homecoming Court at school. Her date is a Cuban refugee his once wealthy family remain in Cuba. He hates Castro but encounters prejudice because he is Cuban and poor.

On top of everything else Wes is visited by someone who is supposed to be 'dead' and who threatens to destroy his family just as surely as Fidel Castro threatens to destroy America.

I liked Wes Avery. He is a good man who sees things straight but is forced to prevaricate to protect his family. He wants to protect his daughter from knowledge that her world may be about to end, allowing her to enjoy the simple pleasures of being on the Homecoming Court. And he must protect his wife from knowing that a person from her past is returned, a person who could destroy his family.

The novel delivers a lot of history and background information on the political and social climate of the time. Wes's flashbacks do become intrusive and slow the momentum of the story. McCarthy has a lot she wants us to know, but not all of it fits seamlessly into the story. It is my main criticism of the novel.

For readers younger than we Boomers, the novel offers insight into a time when mainland America first felt the threat of war on their home turf, long before the attacks of 9-11. They will wonder at America's nativity. As Peter Pan told Wendy, "You see, children know such lot now." A sad wisdom indeed.


I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Place We Knew Well
Susan Carol McCarthy
Random House-Bantom Dell
Publication Date September 29, 2015
$27.95 hard cover
ISBN: 9780804176545