“The Shadow of War” by Jeff Shaara (St. Martin’s Press, 2024, 349 pages, $30.00)
Jeff Shaara is one of the most prolific authors of our times, with 15 New York Times bestselling novels to his credit. They include “To Wake The Giant,” “The Eagle’s Claw” and “The Old Lion.” He also wrote “Gods And Generals” and “The Last Full Measure” which are the prequel and sequel, respectively, to his father Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, “The Killer Angels.”
Shaara’s newest book is “The Shadow of War.” Subtitled “A Novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” it’stold from the perspectives of Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the President and his Attorney General; Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union; and Joseph Russo, a professor of English at Florida State University, whose family absorbs the realities of crisis on their evening newscasts.
As Shaara writes, “As with every story I do, this story is told in a personal way, the dialogue and thoughts coming from the characters themselves. My research, always, calls on the words of those characters, their memoirs, diaries…or those of people around them, the people who were there. In this case, I had one advantage I’ve not experienced before. One of those witnesses
was me.”
Like Shaara, I grew up in the shadow of the
Cold War. I remember my parents talking about atomic bomb tests in 1954, when I was 7 years old. I was also part of the generation that was told that getting beneath my school desk offered protection from a nuclear attack. I was 15 (by the way, Shaara would have been 10) in October of 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis was taking place. Was the Soviet Union really putting atomic warheads 90 miles away from the USA? Was the Kennedy Administration willing to go to war? I can tell you that this was a trying time for a young kid from a small town in northwest Missouri.
This book is a page-turner and thriller in the vein of Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum — but perhaps more compelling because it’s based on real events. At the end of the book, I again breathed a sigh of relief, as did the world in 1962, when Premier Khrushchev packed up his missiles and took them home.
Contact Ted Ayres at tdamsa76@yahoo.com.
