Fans pick 100 books like Where the Boys Are

Lincoln Cushing was born in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a State Department official with the U.S. Information Agency. I first met Lincoln at a conference on the Global Sixties and he later introduced me to his extensive poster and political graphics collection. This book, one of several by Cushing on political posters, documents Cuba’s extraordinary post-revolutionary poster art, which became renowned the world over in left-wing circles. Cushing has in-depth knowledge of the printing processes involved and was granted direct access to many of the most well-known graphic artists who stayed in Cuba to collaborate with the regime. If you’re looking for the best book discussing Cuba’s revolutionary poster art tradition, this is it.

What I appreciated most about this book is the clarity of the images and the close attention to historical detail that Cushing provides. He organizes the book thematically, focusing especially on the posters produced by OSPAAAL… show more.

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

Vibrant countercultural scenes grounded in local rock movements transpired across virtually every country in Latin America during the 1960s-70s. There are now several important books that examine various facets of these countercultural movements, and Barr-Melej’s is one of the best in that respect. Focusing on the brief period of Socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-73), his discussion of Chilean jipis and the political battles waged by the Left to contain this so-called foreign import is fascinating. The book falls short in providing an earlier context to the rise of Chile’s countercultural movement and ends abruptly with the rise of dictatorship—a period that transformed rock music into a site of active political protest. But its merits outweigh its shortcomings, especially the lively narration about the Piedra Roja rock festival, Chile’s equivalent of Woodstock. 

I’ve known Barr-Melej for many years and eagerly awaited the publication of this book, which was one of only… show more.

There is no U.S. equivalent to the comic strip “Mafalda,” a strip centered around a young, middle-class girl and her entourage of neighborhood friends set in mid-1960s Buenos Aires. The strip itself only lasted a decade but its afterlives continue to reverberate across Latin America and throughout other parts of the world. Today, the face of Mafalda—the strip’s namesake—can be found with a speech bubble protesting any number of injustices. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this is the most important comic strip ever written, and one whose appeal lies both in its simplicity and the subtle depth of its political humor. Published here in translation, Cosse, a noted scholar of cultural and social history, has written a biography of the strip and its characters as a way not only of understanding the crisis of Argentina’s middle classes, but the ways in which the mass media transform objects… show more.

Anyone interested in learning about any part of the history of Cuba should start with Ada Ferrer’s magnificent, Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History. Ferrer is one of the premier historians of Cuba in the world, and an excellent writer as well. In Cuba, she begins with her own birth on the island, and then spans the history of her homeland from Columbus to COVID, covering major topics, trends, and events in between, and thoroughly engaging the reader throughout. The text is sophisticated but accessible, expansive but detailed—it is first-rate scholarship while simultaneously emotionally rewarding. I both laughed out loud and cried on various occasions while reading Ferrer’s book, and I learned a great deal, even though I am a scholar of Cuban history myself. The book will provide vital context to the reader of 1930s Cuban history.

Max Hastings is a journalist and author of several dozen books mainly on warfare. Being well-connected he is able to draw on a wide circle of friends and acquaintances to contribute their experiences, research, and ideas to his own analysis of one of the most potentially dangerous events in post-war history.

His books draw on a very wide range of sources and are invariably highly readable but also reliable. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Abyss pulls facts together in a digestible way with references throughout and a useful but far from complete bibliography.

What is remarkable is that the work was undertaken within the constraints of the Covid-19 pandemic that effectively closed off archives and libraries for up to two years.

“Gitmo” is where the relationship between these nations gets concrete, through the protectorate (1902-1934), republican (1934-1959), and revolutionary eras (1959-present). This fine study gets down into the nitty-gritty of who labors for whom (Cubans for the U.S. military), who controls the physical space in and around a foreign military base (and the foreign military based in it), and the steadily growing class conflict in this flashpoint of empire leading up to the Revolution, followed by an odd stasis since then.

This book was written by one of the leading photographic interpreters of the Cold War. He worked directly under Art Lundahl at the National Photographic Interpretive Center (NPIC) in preparing and briefing President Kennedy on the high-altitude U-2 and low-level RF-8A Crusader's photoreconnaissance imagery that confirmed Soviet missiles in Cuba. Dino Brugioni was a family friend and a mentor to me as a young adult. He personally escorted me thru the CIA headquarters in 1977 when I was 12 years old shortly after my father’s death earlier that year. When I founded The Cold War Museum in 1996, Dino agreed to serve as an Advisory Board Member. Dino is a great writer and researcher. This book really helps the reader to learn about the importance of photographic reconnaissance, Cuban Missile Crisis, and how close we came to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Norman Polmar and I have been colleagues and friends for over 20 years. Not only have we served together on several Cold War history panels including the DIA’s 60th-anniversary conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis in 2022, but we also co-authored the Epilog for my father’s book, Operation Overflight, when it was republished in 2004. Polmar’s book is an in-depth study of the personalities that orchestrated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even the title, DEFCON-2, emphasizes exactly how close we came to launching an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in October 1962.

I first met Colonel Whitten in October 2012 when he attended the Cuban Missile Crisis 50th Anniversary conference that I organized for The Cold War Museum and George Mason University. His book is a nonfiction narrative about the Marine Composite Reconnaissance Squadron 2 (VMCJ-2) that flew low-level photographic reconnaissance flights over Cuba before, during, and after the Crisis in their F8U-1P (RF-8A) Crusaders. As a result of these missions, the VMCJ-2 squadron was awarded a Navy Unit Commendation for the period September 1, 1960 – December 1, 1962. According to USMC Brigadier General William A. Bloomer (ret) who wrote the forward, this book not only gives an account of the Marine Corps role in the Crisis but also, “recounts Castro’s rise to power, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his build up in military capabilities courtesy of the Soviet Union.”