The crisis ended peacefully

Eight months before Oct. 16, 1962—the day U.S. President

John F. Kennedy was informed of the presence of Soviet

nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida—the

U.S. had already imposed a unilateral trade embargo on the

regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. That’s largely

because Fidel, who ruled Cuba from 1959 until handing the

presidency to his younger brother Raúl in 2006, had aligned

his Caribbean nation with the Soviet Union. Now, by letting

the Soviets use bases in Cuba to position ballistic missiles

that could strike deep into the U.S.—and by urging Soviet

leader Nikita Khrushchev, according to Khrushchev’s account,

to fire those missiles when Kennedy ordered a naval blockade

of the island during the 13-day U.S.-Soviet standoff—Fidel

had further stoked Washington’s wrath.

(PHOTOS: Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: 50 Years from

the Brink of Armageddon)

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The crisis ended peacefully when the Soviets removed the

missiles in exchange for a pledge to eventually remove U.S.

missiles from Turkey. But a few months later, on top of the

trade embargo, Kennedy ordered a ban on all U.S. travel to

Cuba. Meanwhile, Fidel tightened restrictions on Cubans’

ability to leave the island. The embargo and the U.S. travel

ban, incredibly, are still in effect—and so is the Cuban

regime’s policy of using those measures as a scapegoat for

the impoverished island’s economic blunders and as an excuse

for the repression of political rights. “For 50 years,”

says Tomás Bilbao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group

in Washington, D.C., which advocates an end to the embargo as

well as democratic reform in Cuba, “both sides have

continually taken measures that prevent the free flow of

people, to the detriment of Cuban civil society. Now both

sides are finally starting to take steps to facilitate it.”

Anatolyevich Medvedev

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Minutes after the polls closed on March 2 in the westernmost Russian city of Kaliningrad--certifying a blowout victory by presidential candidate Dmitri Anatolyevich Medvedev, handpicked heir to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin--the men of the hour made an appearance at a massive concert underway in Red Square. As broadcast by NTV, a television channel owned by Gazprom (where Medvedev chairs the board of directors), the scene looked like something out of Mission: Impossible. A low-placed camera tracked alongside Putin and Medvedev, dressed Kremlin Casual in a boxy leather jacket (Dima) and a parka (Volodya), as they strode, to a rock beat, across the convex cobblestone expanse of the square. The shot's director, perhaps taking another cue from Tom Cruise movies, had removed background extras or anything else the eye could use to calibrate the heroes' heights: Medvedev is 5'4" to Putin's 5'7". The action duo climbed onto the stage, and Medvedev--a professed headbanger who had had a box reserved at the Led Zeppelin reunion show in London on the day Putin named him his successor--got to live out a rock 'n' roll moment. He grabbed the mic and yelled "Privet, Rossiya! Privet, Moskva!" (the Russian equivalent of "Hello, Cleveland"). The square went wild. His fervor subsiding, the president-elect segued into an anodyne victory speech about the need to "fortify stability" and "improve quality of life." The crowd began chanting "Con-grats! Con-grats!"--an unusually impersonal choice of a mantra. Medvedev passed the microphone to his benefactor, and the chant immediately changed. "Pu-tin! Pu-tin! PU-TIN!!!" Medvedev politely smiled.

These numbers far overshadow

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The storm of death and destruction unleashed by the Civil War is not a new discovery, however much it tends to recede in our current age of real and potential exterminisms. There were more than a million casualties and more than six hundred thousand deaths (we will never know the precise numbers) sustained by both sides during the Civil War. These numbers far overshadow any other war in which Americans have participated and roughly approximate the human costs of all other American wars combined. Yet for all that has been written about the Civil War, about its politics, battles, strategies, and consequences, we know almost nothing about the problems of death that the war forced upon North and South alike.
If for nothing else, Faust's book would be immensely valuable for taking us to this hallowed and wrenching ground; but there is much more as well. This Republic of Suffering--Faust takes these words from Frederick Law Olmsted, as he looked, aghast, over the sea of wounded and dying Union soldiers on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862--asks us to consider how soldiers and civilians, families and friends, military commanders and state officials confronted both the prospects and the logistics of what was in many respects a new type of death, and how everyone may have been changed by it. Quietly but forcefully, Faust shows that Civil War death had a social, cultural, and political history, and one that may have played a signal role in creating modern American society.