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The Bomber Mafia
A review of

The Bomber Mafia

A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

Malcolm Gladwell • Little, Brown US • 2021

Death from Above

by David Meyer

Best-selling public intellectual Malcolm Gladwell offers a detailed history of the United States’ bombing tactics in World War II.

In a departure from the social psychology themes of his earlier books – The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, among them – New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell pursues a personal interest, one that only dedicated war buffs will likely share.

He introduces a cadre of Army Air Corps visionaries – dubbed the Bomber Mafia – who shared a dream: fleets of precision bombers leveling factories and destroying the enemy’s ability to fight. They believed this strategy would spare millions of lives. While more brutal tactics – like those of massive bombing strategist Curtis LeMay – prevailed, the Bomber Mafia spirit lives on in Gladwell’s prose.

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