| Name of the Book | The Bomber Mafia |
| Author | Malcolm Gladwell |
| Publisher and Year of Publishing | Little, Brown and Company, 2021 |
| Price | ₹ 629, Paperback |
CHECKLIST RATING: 3/5
Reviewer: Kvulo Lorin
I am a Malcolm Gladwell fan. Having said that, I feel this is his weakest book till date. It’s not a bad book and is a must read for any of his fans but if you are a first-time reader then my recommendations would be Outliers or The Tipping Point. Part of its weakness might be because the story was originally telecast in his hit podcast Revisionist History”, which was downloaded 54 million times in 2020. As such it reads like a podcast adapted to a book. That being said it tackles a moral question about war with detailed references from World War II. Like all Gladwell books, it’s hard to put down once you start.
The publisher writes “In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?”
Gladwell is a gifted storyteller, and does well to make us look at things from a different angle in so few pages. You will learn something and it could leave you pondering on the effectiveness of bombing especially if you like war stories.
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