Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Reynolds, David

3.86

108 ratings by Goodreads

9780141026084: Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141026081 ISBN 13: 9780141026084

Publisher: Penguin, 2008

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In this incisive and readable book, David Reynolds takes us from the Babylonians right up to Blair and Bush, but the core of his account is six case studies of modern summitry. Using the records of the meetings, he explores how world leaders saw their opponents and how they played their own cards. He also reconstructs the enormous physical and emotional pressures upon them during encounters that could spell life or death for millions.

The pioneer of modern summitry was Neville Chamberlain, whose dramatic flights to meet Hitler in September 1938 set patterns and taught lessons for all who followed. Some of the meetings involve a trio of leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945; Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David in 1978 – but the heart of the story are three superpower duels that span the Cold War. Drawing on newly-opened archives, Reynolds examines the disastrous face-off between Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961, which helped spark the Cuban missile crisis and America’s disastrous war in Vietnam. He looks at the Moscow summit between Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972, which began a promising era of d�tente but whose Machiavellian negotiation by Nixon and Kissinger also helped ensure d�tente’s decline. By contrast, the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Geneva in 1985 began a series of summits that brought the Cold War to a peaceful end. From it Reynolds draws larger lessons for successful summitry.

Written with verve and insight by a prize-winning international historian, Summits takes us into the minds of statesmen caught up in a bizarre mixture of competition and camaraderie as they stand, for a moment, on top of the world.

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Rare Book

Review:

Wall Street Journal
"Only one chapter in Summits is about Yalta...but so astute is David Reynolds's analysis of the proceedings that it's worth getting hold of this book just for that section."

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