Description
Book SynopsisBy the author of Ashes Under Water (Lyons Press), here is one of the great untold stories of World War II. The Hidden Hindenburg at last reveals the cause of aviation's most famous disaster and the duplicity that kept the truth from coming to light for three generations. It also finally catches up with a German legend who misled the world about the Hindenburg to bury his own Nazi connections.
Drawing on previously unpublished documents from the National Archives in Washington, along with archival collections in Germany, this definitive account explores how the Hindenburg was connected to the Dachau concentration camp, a futuristic German rocket that terrified the Allies, and a classified project that imported Nazi scientists to America after the war.
It took author Michael McCarthy four years to get to the bottom of this epic disaster, in which the largest object civilization has ever managed to fly burnt up in less than one minute. Along the way, he found a tal
Trade ReviewAbout Ashes Under Water:
“This is a tour-de-force from an enormously gifted writer. In quickly sketched chapters McCarthy depicts a mysterious early-twentieth-century shipping disaster—the weather, the moguls, the greed, the ads, the hundreds of working people setting out for a picnic who ended up in a makeshift morgue. The second half of the book brilliantly tracks the legal maneuvering and the murky trial that ultimately exonerated the crew, government inspectors, and the owners. Ashes Under Water is prodigiously researched and richly imagined. McCarthy’s vivid images kept bringing me back to our own contemporary society with its increasing disparity between the middle class and the powerful rich.”—Jeanne Murray Walker, author of The Geography of Memory
“After more than a decade of research, journalist and Chicago resident Michael McCarthy shares a heartbreaking history in Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America. McCarthy gives this little-known Lake Michigan tragedy a thorough and compassionate telling and covers the media frenzy and indictments that followed. . . . Plentiful notes and a lengthy bibliography provide opportunity for further study for those interested. Ashes Under Water is carefully researched yet compellingly told and combines the appeal of famous historical figures and places with everyday men and women struggling to survive. In this thoughtful treatment, the Eastland’s story will deservedly capture the sympathy and imagination of diverse readers.”—Foreword Reviews
