Overview

The epic story of two broken Americans--a shattered Army veteran and a mischievous party girl--who together in 1972 pulled off the longest-distance hijacking in U.S. history. The true stroy of the longest-distance hijacking in American history. In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of'60s idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week, using guns, bombs, and jars of acid. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. Their criminal exploits mesmerized the country, never more so than when shattered Army veteran Roger Holder and mischievous party girl Cathy Kerkow managred to comandeer Western Airlines Flight 701 and flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom-a heist that remainsthe longest-distance hijacking in American history. More than just an enthralling story about a spectacular crime and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath, The Skies Belong to Us is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail.

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9780307886118

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Reviews

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Selected as a Top Ten Book of the Year by Dwight Garner, New York Times A Slate Staff Pick of 2013 A Google Play Best Book of 2013 A KQED Best Book of 2013 This material, naturally a great yarn, is handled exceedingly well... Koerner has a rare empathy, and by acknowledging the fullness of [this] strange story, he suggests a deeper truth about the nature of extremism. - New York Times Book Review Such pure pop storytelling that reading it is like hearing the best song of summer squirt out of the radio. Both the author and his subjects are so audacious that they frequently made me laugh out loud. -Dwight Garner, New York Times Brilliantly evoking the atmosphere of the era with its bubbling racial tensions, Vietnam War disillusionment, and marijuana fug, The Skies Belong To Us weaves a vivid retelling of America's longest-distance hijacking and its globe-spanning, stranger-than-fiction aftermath with the history of this most mediagenic of crimes... As The Skies Belong To Us so entertainingly and insightfully demonstrates, even a recent historical era can seem not merely like a different time, but like a different planet. - The Daily Beast The free-wheeling, hijacking-crazy days of the 1960s and early '70s come to life vividly in Brendan I. Koerner's evocative new page-turner The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. With abundant research and a sharp eye for the absurd, Koerner transports us to a time long before anyone thought of crashing planes into buildings, when people took over airplanes for all sorts of weird reasons that were only occasionally political. - Los Angeles Times Thrums with the revolutionary, paranoid energy of the era. - Boston Globe Koerner's book is original and riveting, relying on extensive information derived from Freedom of Information Act requests, newspaper reports, andn

Author Information

BRENDAN I. KOERNER is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Now the Hell Will Start, which was optioned by filmmaker Spike Lee. A former columnist for both The New York Times and Slate, he was named one of Columbia Journalism Review's ""Ten Young Writers on the Rise."" Visit www.theskiesbelongtous.com and follow him at @brendankoerner.

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