Summits : six meetings that shaped the twentieth century
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Bibliographic Information
Summits : six meetings that shaped the twentieth century
Allen Lane, 2007
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
`It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit.' Winston Churchill coined the term in 1950 but the temptation of summitry has been around for centuries. 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 - made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction, and made into household news by the mass media. 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 detente but whose Machiavellian negotiation by Nixon and Kissinger also helped ensure detente'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.
by "Nielsen BookData"