1972, The Longest Year in History, Volume 2

In 1972: The Longest Year in History, Volume 2, Blake Lee Mahon plunges the reader into the heart of a world unravelling between May and August of the most pivotal year of the twentieth century. This volume chronicles a season where détente and destruction walked side by side—while Nixon signed arms control treaties in Moscow, American warplanes unleashed the heaviest bombing of the Vietnam War, mining Haiphong Harbor and igniting Operation Linebacker. The global stage was a paradox: superpowers promised peace at the nuclear level while fueling proxy wars below. At the same time, terrorism gained a new vocabulary—the Japanese Red Army and PFLP at Lod Airport, the IRA's Bloody Friday, and impending tragedy in Munich—proving that attention had become the most valuable weapon. The world's leaders negotiated survival in marble halls while cities, airports, and Olympic villages became battlefields of ideology. Yet this was also a season of profound transformation and fragile hope. The first Earth Summit in Stockholm gave voice to the planet itself, inaugurating a global environmental conscience, while Title IX and landmark court rulings redefined justice and equality. Idi Amin's brutal expulsion of Uganda's Asian community revealed how quickly a nation could be remade through cruelty and decree. Above the chaos, machines rose: Venera 8 pierced the violent atmosphere of Venus, and Landsat 1 looked back at Earth, forcing humanity to confront the damage it could no longer deny. And as Munich prepared to welcome the world with glass, hope, and innocence, a darker truth lurked—the world had learned to see everything, but not yet to protect it. This is the story of a year that refused to end, a summer where history did not unfold—it detonated.