The Confidence Men; How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
Jonathan Corum (Maps) New York: Random House, 2021. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. xvi, 329, [7] pages. Author's Note. References. Notes. Index. Margalit Fox (born 1961) is an American writer. She began her career in publishing in the 1980s, before switching to journalism in the 1990s. She joined The New York Times in 2004, and authored over 1,400 entries before her retirement from the staff of the paper in 2018. Fox has written several non-fiction books. She has written widely on language, culture and ideas for The New York Times, New York Newsday, Variety and other publications. Her work was anthologized in Best Newspaper Writing, 2005. The Newswomen's Club of New York awarded Fox its Front Page Award in 2011 for her collection of work at The New York Times. Her book, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History, was nominated for the Edgar Award in the category of Best Fact Crime. The New York Times Book Review said that Fox "unspools the men's delightfully elaborate prison-break scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine." Lieutenant Elias Henry Jones (21 September 1883 – 22 December 1942) was an administrator in India and officer in the Indian Army who, together with Australian C. W. Hill, escaped from the Yozgat prisoner of war camp in Turkey during the First World War. Their story was told in Jones' book The Road to En-dor. Cedric Waters Hill (3 April 1891 – 5 March 1975) was an Australian officer in the Royal Flying Corps and later the Royal Air Force whose escape story was told in his own book The Spook and the Commandant. Derived from a Kirkus review: A journalist reconstructs the brazen exploits of two World War I prisoners of war who faked mental illness to escape from “the Alcatraz of its day.” Situated amid the barren Anatolian mountains, Turkey’s Yozgad prison camp was so remote that no barbed wire surrounded it; authorities considered it “escape-proof.” The world learned otherwise from an outlandish plot devised by Elias Henry Jones, an Oxford-educated British officer taken prisoner when his country surrendered after the siege of Kut-al-Amara, which had left his compatriots foraging desperately for food. Jones teamed with Cedric Waters Hill, a downed Australian pilot whose earlier work as a magician helped the pair refine an ingenious scheme. They used a handmade Ouija board, fake seances, and other types of “spooking” to persuade the camp commandant that he could find gold buried at Yozgad if they left the camp to learn its location from distant “spirits.” After he agreed, they feigned madness in a Constantinople insane asylum and sought repatriation for medical reasons. Fox tells a brisk story filled with colorful background on the magic, spiritualism, and psychiatry of the day. What’s unclear is why Jones and Hill went to such extraordinary lengths to escape when, for prisoners, they passed the time in what Jones described in his memoir as 'comparative ease.' They lived in houses with gardens; they could receive mail; and their Ottoman captors paid salaries to British officers. Jones and Hill showed remarkable daring. The brisk true story of a jailbreak so bizarre it might rate an entry in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Elias Henry Jones, Cedric Waters Hill, POW, Prisoners of War, Escape, Ouija board, Seance, Yozgad, Madness, Insane Asylum, Repatriation, Magic, Spiritualism, Psychiatry, Ottoman
ISBN: 9781984853844
[Book #86138]
Price: $35.00