Jun
1
11:00pm
Book Launch: The Confidence Men
By The Mercantile Library
Join us for the virtual launch of The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered The Most Remarkable Escape in History by Margalit Fox
Fox will be joined in conversation by Liza Mundy, author of CODE GIRLS: The Untold Story Of The American Women Code Breakers of World War II, and our 2018 Science & Nature Signature Lecturer.
In The Confidence Men—“The Great Escape for the Great War”—Margalit Fox takes readers along on the most singular prison break in history, in which two British officers escape from a POW camp ... by means of a Ouija board.
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two young officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.
Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
Copies of The Confidence Men can be ordered via Joseph-Beth Cincinnati HERE.
Download a special Readers Guide and a printable Spirit Board HERE.
Free and open to the public.
About Margalit Fox
Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
About Liza Mundy
Liza Mundy is an award-winning journalist and New York Times-bestselling author of four books including Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II. She writes for the Atlantic, Politico, and Smithsonian, among others, and has received fellowships from the Japan Society, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
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