Leonardo Campus, I sei giorni che sconvolsero il mondo: La crisi dei missili di Cuba e le sue percezioni internazionali [Six days that shook the world: The Cuban missile crisis and its international perception]. Florence: Le Monnier, 2014. 541 pp. €28.00.

This is a most unusual book, at the same time enthralling and frustrating, often infuriatingly so. It is not a new narrative of the Cuban missile crisis, even though it begins with a day-to-day, occasionally hour-by-hour, chronicling of the events that stretches to more than 100 pages. This initial section is based largely on the standard scholarly interpretations and does not provide either new revelations or an original interpretation. The chronicle is interspersed, though, with reactions and comments in the press, as well as from personalities (e.g., Bertrand Russell and Pope John XXIII) who contributed to shape the international debate during the crisis. Thus, the drama that unfolded in the White House and the Kremlin is constantly reconnected to the reverberations in the public sphere, and vice versa. This offers an expanded setting in which to assess not so much the key decisions as the public context, discursive tropes, and...