The Spy Who Saved the World by Schecter & Deriabin
The story of Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet Colonel who fed military intelligence to the US and UK before being caught and executed.
The authors argue that Penkovsky’s data on Soviet missile programs and strategic doctrine gave Kennedy a crucial edge in both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
This is a focused chronicle of the Apollo program and the astronauts that flew during it.
Still quite incredible that such feats were accomplished in the mid-twentieth century with such rudimentary technologies–almost through sheer will of the thousands and thousands of people that made it happen.
These two books overlap in the early 1960s and I am always re-awed by that decade and just how many world-shaping events were happening simultaneously. It must have been a wild time to be alive.