In The Shadow of Dora

by Patrick Hicks

In the Shadow of Dora spans two very different decades from the Nazi concentration camp of Dora-Mittelbau to the coast of central Florida in the late 1960s; the book tells the story of the real life intersections between the horror of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program and the wonderment of the Apollo missions. Eli Hessel, a brilliant young Jewish mathematician, finds himself deep beneath a mountain where he is forced to build Nazi rockets. When he is finally freed from this secret underground concentration camp, he immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and is recruited by NASA to help build the largest rocket ever to rise above a launch the Saturn V. To his shock, though, he will be under the command of former Nazi scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, both of who were at Dora. As America turns to the moon and cheers for rockets that lance the sky, Eli is swallowed up by the past and must cope with memories he thought were safely buried. This is a novel that asks questions about memory, morality, technology, and how the past influences the present. If we clamp down images of horror, will they always ignite and rise up on us?

“This is a harrowing journey of survival, one that traces the indomitable spirit of one lone man as he spirals deeper and deeper within the Holocaust—while also recognizing what it takes, minute by minute and day by day, to survive decades into the future. This painful yet beautifully written novel adds to the necessary literature of the Holocaust. Hicks is determined to undo the erasures of time while revealing our humanity with a clear-eyed lens. This is what the art of the novel was invented to do.”
  — Brian Turner , author of My Life as a Foreign Country and Here, Bullet
“Patrick Hicks has managed to bring two of history’s greatest events down to the molecular level in the extraordinary character of Eli Hessel, a survivor of the Holocaust and a member of the vast team of scientists that put a man on the moon. This story is gripping in its tragedy, thrilling in its detail, and unforgettable for its protagonist, whose will to not only survive, but thrive, live, and love is a testament to the human spirit. In the Shadow of Dora is tenacious, just like its hero. I’ll never forget it.” — Peter Geye , author of Northernmost and Wintering  
“ In the Shadow of Dora is an astonishing novel. With a poet’s eye and meticulously lyric prose, Patrick Hicks unspools a harrowing tale that begins in a Nazi concentration camp and ends on the Apollo 11 launch pad. It is between these two extremes—the most base of the basest of evils and the highest of all human achievements—that Eli’s story unfolds. Hicks’ novel is fundamentally a narrative of inquiry and Is the past what defines us? Does the future redeem us? How can you know if you’re dead? This is a profoundly moving book.” — Jill Alexander Essbaum , New York Times Bestselling author of Hausfrau  
“Spanning decades and continents, In the Shadow of Dora reveals in aching detail the heights of human ingenuity and the depths of human cruelty, and, most importantly, the ways those heights and depths are inextricably intertwined in the history of the twentieth century. This is a revelatory novel.”  — Joe Wilkins , author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers  
“In this compelling novel based on historical facts, Patrick Hicks places America’s glittering quest to land on the moon squarely inside the dark shadow of the Holocaust. Few novels I have read so effectively and disturbingly question the relationship between the triumph of technological achievement and our willingness to ignore injustice.”             — Kent Meyers , author of The Work of Wolves and Twisted Tree

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Book Club

224 pages, Paperback

Published October 14, 2020

About the author

Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names, Adoptable, and This London—he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which was published by Steerforth/Random House.

His work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Huffington Post, Guernica, The Utne Reader, and many others.

He has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize, he was recently a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, the Dzanc Short Story Competition, the Gival Press Novel Award, and the Steinberg Essay Prize. His poetry has appeared on NPR, The PBSNewsHour, and American Life in Poetry. His first novel held company among only 20 books selected for National Reading Group Month and it was listed as a Top Pick for First Year College Programs. A winner of the Glimmer Train Fiction Award, he is also the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships, including awards from the Bush Artist Foundation, the South Dakota Arts Council, the Loft Literary Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was recently a finalist for an Emmy and is the radio host of Poetry from Studio 47.

A dual-citizen of Ireland and America, he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member at the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. He has lived in Northern Ireland, England, Germany, and Spain, but has returned to his Midwestern roots. When not writing, he enjoys watching thunderstorms roll across the prairie with his British wife and he is a sucker for playing in the backyard with his son, who was adopted from South Korea.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review for the Minneapolis Star Tribune: https://www.startribune.com/review-in...

It’s a truism that much of what we think we know about history is, if not a lie, then not exactly the total truth, either. Yet that bit of conventional wisdom keeps proving itself relevant in surprising ways. For instance, contrary to what many people think, the Space Age began neither in Russia nor America, but in a lesser-known German concentration camp called Dora-Mittelbau, where the world’s first rocket, the V2, was built using the labor of imprisoned Jews.

The author of more than 10 books, Patrick Hicks is best known for his 2014 novel “The Commandant of Lubizec,” a fictionalized exploration of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the planned extermination of Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. His latest novel, “In the Shadow of Dora,” revisits World War II, but this time through the unexpected connections between the Holocaust and NASA’s Apollo Space Program.

This slim but intensely researched book centers on Cape Canaveral, Fla., in July of 1969 and the tunnels of a former mine, “a place of labyrinths, crypts, and hidden waterways” where protagonist Eli Hessel, “a Jew from Berlin,” works as a skilled laborer soldering fuses and building propellant tanks for the Nazis’ secretive V2 rocket program. Of his and his fellow workers’ endurance of abuse in Dora, he notes, “They weren’t being treated like children — that would imply they were still human beings — they were being treated more like machines. A machine was replaceable. A machine had no past and no future.”

Apollo 11, the spaceflight that landed humans on the moon, has been held up as the apex of American achievement, but Hicks’ novel dramatizes how this incident was far from purely glorious, aided as it was by Wernher von Braun, a Nazi party and SS member, who “would spend the rest of his life bending attention away” from those facts.

Hicks depicts the dissonance that Eli, after his liberation and immigration to America, experiences when he and von Braun cross paths again. Eli recognizes his fellow scientist as “nothing more than an opportunist whose career had profited off the murder of thousands” and feels sickened by the sleazy bargain his adopted country makes by having the ex-Nazi at Kennedy Space Center.

In the 75 years since its conclusion, World War II has been the subject of countless works of literature, so much so that some readers might feel as if the subject has been exhausted. Yet this fall, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released a survey that revealed how little many Americans know about the Holocaust. Nearly two-thirds of respondents were unaware that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, almost half were unable to name one concentration camp, and 12% said they’d never heard the world Holocaust.

Clearly, the need for new books to uphold the vow “Never again” remains. Eli reflects that “Dora had no place in this story of discovery and optimism,” but Hicks’ novel refuses to permit such an erasure.

[Andrew Erickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hicks engages his signature beautiful language and exquisite eye for detail to elevate annals of history to extraordinary heights in this slim tour de force.

He echoes Primo Levi on the limits of language as his Holocaust-survivor-narrator, Eli, attempts to relate his experience. When questioned about the name of the camp in which he labored, Eli laments that Dora “didn’t have the same draining effect on them as it did on him” and forces him to “admit that different words carry different freight for us all.” The freight that Hicks’ novel carries, then, is that of memory. And it is pernicious.

“Memory had an undertow all of its own, and it pulled him down, down, down into the darkness” writes Hicks (191). Dora pulls the reader, too, down into the darkness of a fictionalized version of the concentration camp where Nazi enslavers turned human beings into raw capital as they worked them to create weapons of mass destruction. Readers cannot help draw parallels to American enslavement as Eli explicitly comments: “We were slaves […] If I didn’t do what they ordered me to do, I would have been killed” (193). In a combined act, Hicks’ novel re-members Nazi scientists who imagined V-2 rockets as instruments to intimidate and control the world and the enslaved laborers who were forced to produce them. Allowing the reader to breathe, however, Dora also provides Eli an aftermath that he acknowledges has been denied most of his kin. Amid the wanton destruction of the Second World War, a specter of hope appears mid-story.

The novel picks up Eli’s later life as a NASA scientist working on the Apollo program. The reader resurfaces in an age of unbridled enthusiasm for technological development that also recalls the high cost of its past, for the advances that put an American on the moon generated down in the darkness of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. Hicks reminds us that not only Eli, but also his Nazi torturers and enslavers were reborn in the American space program. In its zeal to beat Soviets to the moon, the U.S. space program forgot Nazi crimes and placed them at its head.

In three parts the novel engages the reader in collective and individual acts of re-membering the past, in order that we might helpfully engage the present. In the novel this means owning up to the lived reality of the Jewish Shoah of the Second World War and its re-engagement of former, un-convicted Nazi criminals as the “great men” behind the U.S. space program to land a man on the moon.

In the Shadow of Dora provides timely reading that is urgently necessary in our present historical moment. At a critical venture when so many formerly enslaved and disenfranchised groups are calling for a re-membering of history that includes all the ugly spots,
Hicks’ novel implores readers to engage. It reminds us that our past lives with us—it is the freight we carry—and that attempts to forget it come with too high a cost. “Would you accept fascism if it gave you the moon?” the book asks, and Eli urges the reader to not even consider it: “Von Braun did many great things for space and […] was undoubtedly gifted, but his background had been edited, cleaned up. The future couldn’t be hopeful if the man leading the way had a dark past” (163). Eli responds in language that reverberates through history to reach our present moment: “He knew the truth, and he would tell about it” (218, my emphasis).

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Jewish slave of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp, Eli Hessel works on the Nazi’s V-2 missile program. Terror and death, his constant companions, make it nearly impossible to remember that he is a living, breathing human being suffering utterly inhumane conditions. He toils in the tunnels dug deep in the Harz Mountains of Germany, always hungry, always thirsty, always fighting to survive. The SS, especially SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin “Horse Head” Busta, torment Eli and his fellow prisoners through beatings, intimidation, torture, and sadistic games. Nazi scientists watch with indifference, all too willing to sacrifice lives to see the V-2 program succeed. Eli, gifted in mathematics and with a keen intellect for science, often stares at the stars and moon, wishing for escape. And then one day, miraculously, Eli finds himself liberated, the war over, and a new life ahead. But he will forever carry his old life, the burden of the survivor, the burden of the living.

Eli moves to New York, marries, becomes a father, and earns his college degrees. And then, another miracle: he lands a job with the American space program, NASA, and works at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. His demons, however, haven’t left; indeed, some of them are literally in the flesh: the Nazi scientists at Dora-Mittelbau are now the beloved, much-lauded scientists making it possible for the United States to have a space program. That the men complicit in and, indeed, responsible for, the death of so many now stand as darlings of NASA without facing justice torments Eli. But what can he do? Eli tries to focus on the upcoming launch of Apollo 11, but the trauma he lives with begins to consume him once more. Is surviving really the best revenge?

In the Shadow of Dora is as ambitious as it is profound. Hicks has a gifted ability for writing gritty, vivid realism. From the lice biting inside Eli’s camp uniform and the sickening thud of a SS guard’s truncheon on an inmate’s skull, to the clacking typewriters and ringing telephones inside NASA offices to slabs of ice falling from Apollo 11’s fuel tanks, Hicks engages all five senses with startling clarity. Hicks’ thorough research provides compelling historical details, both for Dora-Mittelbau and the Kennedy Space Center. But the power of this novel lies in how Hicks makes us wrestle with difficult questions. What price technology? What price justice? Why should those who inflicted pain and death upon so many escape punishment? That the U.S. government spirited away numerous Nazi scientists as part of Operation Paperclip is a well-documented fact; less documented, however, is how Holocaust survivors grappled with this grave injustice. Through Eli, Hicks forces us to examine this issue, and we must face the disturbing answers, just as Eli must face how his past collides with his present.

In the Shadow of Dora presents a unique, compelling story of survival and endurance, one that shows how the future often intertwines with our past, and how we must never, ever give up hope that “all is well.”

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hicks himself has said that reading a novel is an investment; well this is a worthy one.
With its expressive language and avid attention to detail, In the Shadow of Dora seamlessly blends histories to provide a stark warning for the present and a reminder that the past shapes the future.

Hicks describes the constant terror of life as a slave in a concentration camp with sensitivity and respect. His protagonist – only 21 years old when enslaved, dehumanised to nothing but a number, and forced to watch his family taken to be murdered – dreams of sausages and potatoes by night and fuses circuits for rockets in tunnels by day, with the backdrop of constant terror and demonstrations of brutality. Later, Eli is seemingly living the American dream: he has a family,a house by the ocean and, again, builds rockets, this time as a respected scientist. However, the trauma of his experiences has never left him: he carries both mental and physical scars from his past. Both the physical and mental trauma resurfaces on the eve of “the greatest adventure we have yet undertaken as a species” (167), as his former enslavers also reappear on the scene.

Despite the events of the novel taking place at two distinct points in history – Germany in 1944-5 and Florida in 1969 – the novel’s exploration of the intersect between past and present, past and future, feels increasingly important in 2020. Themes of slavery and dehumanisation, trauma, wrongful imprisonment and the immigrant experience are as important now as ever, and the novel reminds us to ask questions about the “great men” of the present: can any amount of scientific knowledge excuse a person for the murder of millions of innocent people?

[Dee Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I looked forward to and dreaded reading this book, because the author's previous book, THE COMMANDANT OF LUBIZEC just wrecked me. This was equally moving. Eli Hessel is a Jewish man, plucked from Auschwitz, where all of his family had been executed, and taken as slave labor to Dora-Mittelbau. Dora is a secret Nazi installation hidden inside a German mountain, where their prisoners are condemned to build V-2 rockets that will be sent to terrorize the enemy, especially in London. Eli fully expects to be worked to death, or randomly chosen to be killed at any moment, and the first half of the book outlines his grim life at Dora. Somehow, he survives, moves to America, and still fascinated by the idea of rockets, ends up working at NASA. So, however, do the likes of Wernher von Braun and other Nazi scientists, some of whom directly oversaw his torment. As they are hailed as heroes of science in the run-up to the Apollo 13 moon landing mission, Eli struggles to cope with their success, and with America's eagerness to overlook their atrocity-laden past in order to win the space race. Based on historic events, Dora-Mittelbau was an aspect of World War II that was unfamiliar to me, but will never be forgotten now.

[Kathy Melaas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick Hicks has an extraordinary ability to make history come alive. Woven throughout the facts and detailed depiction of life in the Holocaust Nazi slave labor camp Dora-Mittelbau, Eli Hessel’s personality and pain leap from the pages. My heart ached for Eli as he endured the relentless inhumane treatment of building rockets in the tunnels of Dora.
Historians and humanitarians alike will love this book. Eli, and storyteller Patrick Hicks, are well-deserving of the limelight. An extraordinary novel that I'll never forget.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story of liberation and escape. By creating Eli Hessel, a protagonist who lives through the horrors of the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp while aiding in the manufacture of V2 rockets during WWII and the highlights of the Kennedy Space Center while running tests on the Saturn V during the run up to the 1969 moon landing, Patrick Hicks gives us someone who experiences the contrast between the depths of human violence and the apex of human achievement and must come to terms with his survival and his experience of both those extremes. More than once I had to ask myself if the effective absolution of the crimes of the German V2 rocket scientists was truly worth the prestige their knowledge brought to the United States and wonder if our leaders ever considered the same.

[Jenna Albers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read a book quite like this before. Hicks weaves a story of survival in the Holocaust to the wonder that comes with the Apollo launch. Hicks writes a powerful and poignant story to shed light on this little-known connection. I am better for having read it.

[Andria Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, gripping, exquisitely researched novel.

[Lance Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very thoroughly researched and well-written book. It is eminently factual, and tells the story of a man caught in the hell of the Holocaust, enslaved at one of the lesser-known but most brutal of concentration camps, Dora-Mittelbau. Forced to labor making the V-2 rockets that the Third Reich would use in the waning days of the war to bombard London, Belgium and other targets, Eli manages to survive both the camp and the war, and go on to emigrate to the United States and work for NASA on the Apollo project. While there, specters from his past rise to haunt him. Eli is a believable and sympathetic protagonist, and his story is riveting. This is one to read in a single setting because you will want to know what happens on the next page.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have never heard of the Dora-Mittelbau labor camp located in the tunnels of a former mine, you are not alone. This is a novel of the Holocaust, but it shines a light on the terrifying labor camps where Jewish prisoners were forced to create the mighty V-2 rockets that rained destruction all over Europe in the Second World War. Through the narrator, Eli, we experience the sights, sounds, taste, touch and smells of the camp's unofficial slogan, Vernichtung durch arbeit (Extermination through work). This is horror, but numbingly repetitive horror - as with his previous work, The Commandant of Lubizec: A Novel of The Holocaust and Operation Reinhard, the author shows that the constant, unpredictable threat of cruelty and violence by the Nazis served to stun their prisoners into obedience, compliance - even acceptance.

In one horrifying episode, the SS hang a group of Russian prisoners who had sabotaged a winch. "These men dangled from where a rocket should be, and for those standing beneath them, it would be like resting at the bottom of a lake and looking up at swimmers treading water high above. These men scissor-kicked and jerked as they went about the business of dying. They walked the air."

Although grounded in historical fact and peppered with statistics, it is the lyrical storytelling that sets this Holocaust novel apart. Through Eli, Hicks explores the terrible irony linking the barbarism of the Holocaust and the optimism and power of the race to the moon as some of the high-ranking Nazis from Dora are granted a new life as heroes in the United States. Eli is haunted by what he witnessed at Dora and fragments reappear to him unbidden throughout his life - what was a living nightmare now has a wondrous, almost dreamlike quality, and we keenly feel Eli's sense of isolation. How could anyone in his new life in America understand that being moved from Auschwitz to Dora was not the "liberation" they imagine?

Hicks also shows us a sense of wonder, too; Eli is a survivor - his mantra to calm himself, "All is well", helps us to survive the awful truths of this history. I found myself rushing to this happier part of the story, of Eli's involvement with the Apollo missions. But what I really admire was Hicks' ability to combine the dark and the light so powerfully: "[NASA and Dora] were the great poles of his life. The darkest and the brightest. How strange that an arcing of a rocket linked them together."

I read this book in a day but it will stay with me for so much longer.

[Indyed2003]

I finished reading “In the Shadow of Dora” today and easily must say liked it a lot. First of all, it was simply well-written. That’s not an easy thing to do when you’re tackling two big subjects like the Holocaust and the Apollo program. Research, putting it into a book is one thing. But making it readable, a story, is quite another. And Patrick Hicks achieve that.

The first portion of the book takes place at the Dora-Mittlebau concentration camp, where slave labor is used to build the Germans’ V-2 rockets. The concentration camp scenes are realistic and frightening, very visual, very palpable when violence and cruelty occur. The slave labor, under the rule of obscene guards and oversight of major Nazi scientists like Werner von Braun, occurs in the shadows and tunnels of the concentration camp, with the prisoners’ barracks just yards away from those work places — all part of the “shadow” of the title.

And yet the “shadow” continues to pervade the mind of the protagonist, Eli, after the war, after he moves to New York and then to Florida to work on the Apollo space program at Kennedy Space Center. von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and other top Nazi scientists, scooped up by the Americans after the war, are also at Kennedy Space Center, in charge of the space program. I like how the “shadow” of Dora-Mittlebau grows into an increasingly haunting specter (another shadow) the longer the Eli works at Kennedy Space Center. It’s there in the German scientists and the rocketry, of course, but also unfolds inside Eli’s head. The tubes, the rockets, the the vastness of the place, the secrecy, the CIA putting the screws to him, the exposure to von Braun and Rudolph, even the loudspeakers: it’s such a harrowing reminder of his concentration camp experiences that becomes too much, and triggers a sort of delayed PTSD episode that’s very believable. I won’t say any more than that other to say that Hicks does a wonderful job of playing it out.

Eli is a well-drawn character, and I like that Hicks skip pretty much right from Dora to the 1960s, letting the gaps fill in naturally through flashback and memory, letting us stay right with Eli…

Also, the book brought back memories for me. In my late teens and early 20s, I read every Leon Uris book I could get my hands on — consumed by his Holocaust stories. And as a boy, I made models of the Apollo rockets, complete with LEMs. So … an intertwining.

Well, sorry. I don’t mean to write about my own past! This a really solid work. You should read it.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Shadow of Dora: A novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program is by Patrick Hicks. This novel reads just like a memoir and if you don’t read the small print of the title, you could easily be misled. However, this story is definitely one which could have happened and the details of Dora are accurate.
Eli Hassel was a Jew from Berlin who ended up in a rather small camp called Dora- Mittelbau. This camp housed the prisoners who worked in the tunnels created in the ridges a small mountain. Inside these tunnels, the men worked long and horrible hours inside on bombs and torpedoes. They lived in constant fear of death from the guards and starvation. Although they might want to sabotage what they are making, they were watched very carefully and inspections were intense so it was difficult. If they were caught, they were killed.
He tells of the living conditions as well as the working conditions they were under. The guards were as horrible here as elsewhere in the camp system. At least the one thing they could be pretty sure of was that the areas they worked in would not be bombed since they were beneath a mountain. The camp itself was vulnerable as it was outside the mountain.
Many of the scientists who were working in the underground factories were later taken into the US where they were recruited to work on the space program. It was on their work here at Dora that they were able to send the Apollo astronauts into space as soon as they did. Very few people were aware that these scientists who worked on Apollo had actually worked on the Nazi war machines

[G.P. Gottlieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 - an exploration of evil nestled up against science and progress. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they are forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. Eli glimpses Werher von Braun and other scientists, who helped develop the V-2 rocket and were later recruited in Operation Paperclip to work in the United States on our nascent rocket program. Sometimes breathtaking - this is an important, well-told story. I got to interview the author for the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/in-the-sh...

[Cora Mincer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a documentary junkie, Patrick's writing style is one of my favorites. I learned so much while being so captivated by Eli's story. I'm not exaggerating when I say I couldn't put it down - I even woke up extra early this morning to binge as much as I could before work. I cried more than I thought I would and verbally thanked Eli for having the same questions I did about Hogan's Heros. Some stories are soon forgotten, but I know I'll be thinking of this in the back of my mind whenever I see the moon from now on.

[J.M. Josten · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you select a Hicks novel to read you are promised a few items without question. First, the novel will be well researched with a particular attention to telling stories with accuracy and care. Second, Hicks consistently notices slight details that will impact the overall understanding of the scene, character, story, or event. In the Shadow of Dora is a unique story that is visceral and affecting. This is necessary reading. I highly recommend this novel but also recommend you allow yourself some time to read because Hicks will keep you moving through the text.

[Beth Ann Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book captivated my mind and spirit. I could feel everything Eli was going through. This story embodied equal parts horror and hope.

However, I felt like I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth that the Americans so quickly forgave heinous war criminals for the advancement of their space program.

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written, as I expected. The connections and reiterations throughout the story weaved unbreakable connections. Hicks was careful with his wording so that each part of the novel was easily connected to each other.

[Martin Mcgoey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and engaging read about humanity's darkest and brightest moments of the 20th century and the overlooked links between them.

[Cecelia Brennan Femenella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very good about Eli Heiss & the making of the Aplo 11. True story