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Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking
Crown
June 2013
On Sale: June 18, 2013
318 pages ISBN: 0307886107 EAN: 9780307886101 Kindle: B00ATLA9YM Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise
of sixties 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, where they
imagined being hailed as heroes; others aimed to swap
hostages for sacks of cash. Their criminal exploits
mesmerized the country, never more so than when the young
lovers at the heart of Brendan I. Koerner’s The Skies
Belong to Us pulled off the longest-distance hijacking
in American history.
A shattered Army veteran and a
mischievous party girl, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow
commandeered Western Airlines Flight 701 as a vague protest
against the war. Through a combination of savvy and dumb
luck, the couple managed to flee across an ocean with a
half-million dollars in ransom, a feat that made them
notorious around the globe. Koerner spent four years
chronicling this madcap tale, which involves a cast of
characters ranging from exiled Black Panthers to African
despots to French movie stars. He combed through over 4,000
declassified documents and interviewed scores of key figures
in the drama—including one of the hijackers, whom Koerner
discovered living in total obscurity. Yet The Skies
Belong to Us is more than just an enthralling yarn about
a spectacular heist and its bittersweet, decades-long
aftermath. It 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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