Twelve Days

Sebestyen, a journalist whose own family fled from Hungary, gives us a fresh account of this defining moment in the Cold War, incorporating newly released official Hungarian and Soviet documents, his family's diaries, and eyewitness testimony. Tracing the events that led to the rebellion, Sebestyen's narrative moves from the tumultuous streets of Budapest to the Kremlin and the White House, where we hear conversations of those who planned and took part in the uprising and of those who helped crush it--some actively, others through craven inaction. Sebestyen shows how Western rhetoric…