The Bomber Mafia

I’ve tried reading Malcolm Gladwell books several times and found them mildly interesting but not compelling. That changed with his most recent work, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War. It combined three of my favorite things: history, science, and storytelling.

Note that I called this his most recent “work,” not book. The Bomber Mafia, it turns out, started as a series of episodes on Gladwell’s “Revisionist History,” a podcast in which he revisits past events and asks whether historians got them right the first time. Gladwell and his audio production company, Pushkin Industries, have combined these episodes into an audio book that I literally could not put down.

You can read the book, by the way, but it’s simply a transcript of the audio program, without the wonderful sound effects, original music, and Gladwell’s mesmerizing narration.

Listening to the narration is like climbing into Malcolm Gladwell’s brain. We witness him pondering, asking questions, formulating ideas, and arriving at startling new answers. Gladwell’s great gift, it seems to me, is curiosity, and it winds like a golden thread through this story.

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