The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History, by Margalit Fox

The next Book Group gathering will be on Wednesday, November 17, from 6:30 to 9:00 PM, location to be determined.  If you (and your partner) plan on attending, RSVP to John Campbell.  Also, if you have an EVEN numbered birth year, please bring a bottle of wine to share.

Excerpts about the book from the Publisher, Penguin Random House:

“The Great Escape” for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time. “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review

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 British 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. 

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.

Source: Bellevue Rotary Club