Washoe County Library System

"In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the "Bomber Mafia", asked:...

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who...

Admiral Yamamoto was a cigar-smoking, poker-playing, Harvard-educated expert on America, and that knowledge served him well as architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the next sixteen months, this military genius lived up to his prediction that he would run wild in the Pacific. After American code-breakers learned that the admiral would be vulnerable for a few hours, a handful of colorful and expendable U.S. Army pilots flew the longest...

The presence of "flying leathernecks" in the Pacific Theater helped lead the United States to victory over the formidable Japanese forces. Dogfighting over the sea and islands, and supporting the amphibious assaults that eventually secured victory over the Japanese in the Pacific, the US Marine Corps' Corsairs, Wildcats and Hellcats proved to be more than just aircraft, becoming icons as World War II progressed. Engaging in combat with Japanese...