Thirteen Days--Kevin Hoskinson (Academic Foundations)

While a lot of books could occupy this space for me, the one I choose to place here is Thirteen Days by Robert F. Kennedy. Capturing the hair-trigger tensions that drove the treacherous dance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days reveals just how near we stood for two weeks to the threshold of human extinction. “Each one of us was being asked to make a recommendation which would affect the future of all mankind,” Kennedy writes, “a recommendation which, if wrong and if accepted, could mean the destruction of the human race.” Incredibly, Robert Kennedy wrote this book in real time, during the hours and minutes he was watching his own brother stagger beneath the weight of this monumentally profound test of political, military, and moral will. Thirteen Days is the cold war on a microscope slide. It is the one book that fuels my fascination with cold war history and led me to design a special topics college composition course that I love to teach. But much more significantly, it is a lesson in the supreme value of ultimately rational minds.