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Ben Macintyre
Rave The Washington Post Macintyre offers a more complete and complex account than is typical in popular histories from the Nazi era. Read in that light, this is less a fairy tale than an honest account of heroic but fallible men in captivity, made more compelling through the acknowledgment of their flaws and failures ... sometimes reads like A Thousand and One Nights meets Groundhog Day, with evermore baroque attempts to exit the same dull trap. But the near whimsy of Colditz took more than one grim turn, and in narrating those darker developments, Prisoners of the Castle works to undo some conventions of World War II escape stories ... With so many absconding prisoners to cover, Macintyre keeps things moving and does not get in the way of his material. He seems aware that this is not a story for literary flourishes but one whose strength resides in the stitching together of voices from disparate historical records ... He knows how to layer dramatic details and doesn’t shy away from sharing the worst things his imprisoned protagonists did, including the degree to which Colditz prisoners quickly replicated the most atrocious aspects of their home societies — from classism and exclusionary social clubs to virulent racism ... Some portraits are particularly moving ... With dozens of characters, Prisoners of the Castle risks becoming a grab bag of vignettes. However, each detainee is memorable enough that readers are unlikely to get lost. And a treasure trove of details is arrayed on the page. Macintyre so seamlessly fuses so many different accounts that their compilation creates something more profound than a simple escape yarn: a biography of the prison itself and the world detainees built there.
John Lancaster
Positive The Washington Post Revealing early in the book that the three-week race ended at sunset on Halloween with the shocking toll of nine dead, Lancaster also takes on its historical context, wrestling with the question of whether the spectacle served any real purpose ... Given the banal experience of commercial air travel today, reviving the wonder and terror of early human flight is no small feat, but the realities of early aviation provide Lancaster more than enough material ... As dozens of planes cross the country and land at the same airports, Lancaster’s subject matter occasionally becomes repetitive. But just as a scene begins to flatten, an aircraft crashes into a tree or flips cleanly onto its back on a landing field, instantly reviving the narrative ... It’s hard to imagine a more ideal narrator ... If he occasionally sacrifices a little drama in the name of completeness, he has, perhaps, more fully honored all those who gave their lives so that we might one day have carry-ons, boarding groups and same-day coast-to-coast flights ... Not everyone may be onboard with his argument that the race was worth it, but Lancaster tells a vivid story and makes a moving case that these early martyrs at the takeoff of domestic aviation gave the rest of us a future in the sky.