Howard Jones, “The Bay of Pigs” (Oxford UP, 2008)

Howard Jones, “The Bay of Pigs” (Oxford UP, 2008)

There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as Howard Jones shows in his masterful The Bay of Pigs (Oxford, 2008). If you think the Bush administration’s foreign policy is ham-fisted, you really need to read this book. The Bay of Pigs makes it seem as if Kennedy’s “best and brightest” couldn’t have successfully organized a bake sale, let alone an invasion. The CIA got the intelligence wrong, the Joint Chiefs fouled up the military planning, and executive branch was living in bizarro world. Sound familiar? I would laugh, but the fact of the matter is that Kennedy and his crew left 1200 exiles–patriots all–to die on the Playa Giron. There are lessons here, if any one cares to draw them. Thanks to Howard Jones for bringing them to our attention when we need them most. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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Anna Reid, "A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution" (Basic Books, 2024)

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Jason Burke, "The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s" (Knopf, 2026)

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Jason Burke's The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Knopf, 2026) is an epic, authoritative, gripping account of the years when a new wave of revolutionaries seized th...

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Alex Wellerstein, "The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age" (Harper, 2025)

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Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that “decision” has logically fallen on US President H...

21 Tammi 1h 4min

Michael P.M. Fox et al., eds., " Framing the First World War: How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict" (UP of Kansas, 2025)

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The character of the conflict that erupted in 1914 defied the expectations of many political leaders and military analysts. Despite the mountains of books and articles published on World War I, there ...

21 Tammi 1h 6min

John M. Findlay, "The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

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At the end of the 1930s, the West was in peril. A cultural and economic backwater, the Great Depression had all-but wiped out the extractive industries which had fueled the region's economy for decade...

19 Tammi 1h 11min

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their military experiences were shaped by the racial environme...

19 Tammi 52min

Duncan Kelly, "Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)

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Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Duncan Kelly is a new intellectual history of the many and varied ideas about politi...

19 Tammi 1h 25min

Amanda G. Madden, "Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy" (Cornell UP, 2025)

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Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence and the Civic Elites in Early Modern Italy (Cornell UP, 2025) is a study of the practice of vendetta among the civic elites in sixteenth-century Italy and illustrates th...

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