Eyeball to Eyeball (Final Failure)
Page 24
Katheryn Smith did a marvelous job putting together the cover design for Eyeball to Eyeball. Thank you, Kate, for making this book look as good as it does!
My fellow members of the Alliterates Writing Society (alliterates.com) have, as always, been supportive and encouraging—and constructively critical—of my work on every step of the way. The whole group, which is spread across the U.S., has offered critique and commentary via our online communications. The Alliterates of the Wisconsin chapter have allowed me to read selections from the book at our meetings and have been willing to brainstorm and counsel me about this book and the whole evolving process of book publishing as our industry moves forward into a new era.
Finally, I could never have pulled this book together without the support, both moral and material, of my fantastic wife, Christine. She has been with me for every step of my career, and has given me her love and encouragement even when things looked very bleak. Words cannot convey how much she has meant to me.
Selected Bibliography
A lot has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I am grateful to the many authors whose work made writing this novel so much easier, and the end result so much more thoroughly grounded in real facts. I employed numerous Internet sources and other articles as well, but the books listed below formed the bedrock of my research.
I would recommend these first two books in particular to any reader who wants to be immersed in the actual history of the crisis. Both provide hour-by-hour (and sometimes minute-by-minute) breakdowns of the key elements of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as precise details on the orders of battle of the respective sides, and the capabilities of weapons and equipment:
Dobbs, Michael, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008
Polmar, Norman, and John D. Gresham, DEFCON – 2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War During the Cuban Missile Crisis. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006
The following books also provided much useful information on the crisis, and on the lives of many of the important people who shaped it.
Anderson, Jon Lee, Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 2010
Carlson, Peter, K Blows Top: A Cold War Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America’s Most Unlikely Tourist. New York: Public Affairs, 2009
Dallek, Robert, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003
Dallek, Robert and Terry Golway, Let Every Nation Know: John F. Kennedy in his own words. Naperville IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2006
Erikson, Daniel P. The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, The United States, and the Next Revolution. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008
Freedman, Lawrence, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000
Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997
May, Ernest R. and Philip D. Zelikow (editors,) The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997
Quirk, Robert E., Fidel Castro. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993
Stern, Sheldon M., The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005
Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003
About the Author
Douglas Niles has written more than forty novels in the areas of alternate history, fantasy, and science fiction. He has written extensively for the shared worlds of TSR Inc, (now Wizards of the Coast), notably in the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms series. Niles has created two unique fantasy worlds, Watershed and Seven Circles, in trilogies published by Ace. Writing with Michael Dobson, he has coauthored three WW2 alternate history novels published by Tor/Forge.
Doug Niles has also written a full-length book and dozens of articles on nonfiction topics, ranging from technology and politics to military history. His expertise in American military history has led to projects analyzing all of America’s wars. He is an award-winning strategy game designer, having created more than a hundred role-playing and wargames.
Niles is a former teacher who left that profession only because he had a chance to make a living while playing at his twin hobbies of writing and gaming. He lives in the countryside of Wisconsin with his wife (his two children having grown up and moved out) and two large dogs.