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The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
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Random House Publishing Group 2021
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom. 
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. 
Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
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Street Date:
06/01/2021
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781984853868
ASIN:
B08HLCGSMF
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APA Citation (style guide)

Margalit Fox. (2021). The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Margalit Fox. 2021. The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. Random House Publishing Group, 2021.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Margalit Fox. The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History. Random House Publishing Group, 2021.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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creators
      • role: Author
      • fileAs: Fox, Margalit
      • bioText: Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
      • name: Margalit Fox
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Random House
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title
The Confidence Men
fullDescription
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom. 
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. 
Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from April 12, 2021
        Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense), a former obituary writer for the New York Times, recounts in this marvelous history how two British army officers in WWI orchestrated “the most singular prison break ever recorded.” Seeking to alleviate the monotony of life at the remote Yozgad prison camp in Turkey, British POWs built a Ouija board from salvaged materials. After numerous failed attempts to raise a spirit, Elias Henry Jones, “the Oxford-educated son of a British lord,” began manipulating the board, convincing his compatriots that they were conversing with the dead. Intended merely as a lark, Jones’s game became a more serious affair when a Turkish officer asked if the board could help him find a buried treasure. Jones partnered with Cedric Waters Hill, an Australian pilot and “master magician,” to devise a complex scheme to trick the camp commandant into sending them to Constantinople, where they spent six months feigning madness in an insane asylum before being repatriated. Fox enriches her account with intriguing deep dives into the psychology of “coercive persuasion,” the mechanics of confidence games, and the history of spiritualism in the U.S. and England. Readers will be mesmerized by this rich and rewarding tale. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        April 15, 2021
        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: "Hedgehog fried in axle grease was surprisingly palatable. Stray dogs found their way onto the table." 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. While other POWs' narratives have shown that captives' reasons for escaping can range from a desire to avoid torture to a will to bear witness to prison horrors, Fox provides little compelling evidence that such factors drove her heroes. Jones and Hill showed remarkable daring, but their motives remain elusive in a tale that, despite its title, is more plot- than character-driven. The brisk true story of a jailbreak so bizarre it might rate an entry in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

        COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        May 15, 2021
        Fox, author of two nonfiction jewels, The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013) and Conan Doyle for the Defense (2018), tells the story of the most amazing prison escape you've probably never heard of. It was at the tail end of the Great War, and two British soldiers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, were among the prisoners at Yozgad, a POW camp in what is now called Turkey. Concocting a story about hidden treasure, and using a Quija board to con the guards into thinking they were speaking to the dead, Jones and Hill did what thousands of prisoners have only dreamed of doing: they got away. It truly is a remarkable story, and it's about much more than the mechanics of a prison break; it's also about two men who were determined to do the impossible. Fox is an excellent storyteller; she writes about real events as though they were the stuff of fiction, bringing the people to vivid life and making the reader feel as though they are part of the story. Another fine true story from an outstanding writer.

        COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        June 1, 2021

        With this latest work, Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense) presents a World War I story of two British officers from different sides of the world--Welsh lawyer Harry Jones and Australian magician Cedric Hill--who collaborated to escape from a Turkish POW camp, using deception, a handcrafted Ouija board, and an insanity plea which sent them to the relative safety of an asylum. The case of the Yazgod prison escapees was distinctive because they employed not weapons or tunnels but ingenuity, by beguiling commandants with a fanciful search for hidden treasure and the power of deception. This well-researched book, based in part on the men's memoirs, gives considerable context to the 20th-century Anglo revival of spiritualism and confidence manipulation, and makes comparisons with the coercive persuasion of later cult leaders and demagogues. It includes photographs of Jones and Hill throughout their careers, along with extensive notes and a bibliography for further research. VERDICT Fans of military history will appreciate this book's attention to the Ottoman side of the war; general readers will learn much about the influence of mass psychology. Like Fox's previous works, this latest is a page-turner.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

        Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones...
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How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
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