Review: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gladwell can make topics you’d think would be boring into an interesting study. Here, he takes on precision bombing. He tackles the subject in a few distinct ways. First he tells the history of the WWII Norton bombsight, including details of its eccentric creator, production, and use. The bulk of the book describes the military theoreticians who believed that more accurate bombs would change war, and follows this group as well as the opposing theoreticians that preferred carpet bombing, telling their stories from before WWII through the current day. This is not Gladwell’s normal pop psychology book, but there are shades of psychology here – it colors what he writes. The only con I recall is the repeated mention of Gladwell’s new imprint to create these audiobooks in the style of an NPR radio documentary. Audiobooks first, book second. While listening to this, with clips of the subjects talking, old newsreel audio, and Gladwell narrating, I don’t see how the paper or e-book version of this book would be as interesting as the audiobook. And the book would require some modification to the text to portray the nuances and details in the audio.

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