Early ReviewersKeith O'Brien

Benno Neuburger, a modest land investor from Munich, and Anna Einstein, daughter of a cattle dealer from Laupheim, marry in 1907.

They begin their lives together with great hope. It is a relatively prosperous time and a very optimistic one for German Jews who are enjoying a social renaissance in the industrializing, urbanizing rising star that is Germany.

It’s not clear that this good fortune might begin to unravel. Even as news of an assassination in an “obscure” Balkan corner of the continent passes like a cold wind through Munich on a warm beer-garden July day, people shudder but feel no great alarm.

Yet what follows is a war provoked by inter-colonialist competition. It is prolonged and bloody, giving way to German defeat, revolution, a brief socialist interlude in Munich, a merciless counter revolution, and the pitiless demagoguery of defeated generals. So marks the commencement of an era of nearly relentless distress and turmoil for Germany.

The lives of Benno and Anna and their extended families are amid this swirl—trying to make a life as they struggle to survive, as they cling to the hope of a peaceful resolution to crisis.

But to no avail. Munich becomes the epicenter of German fascism fed by nationalist resentment and racial madness – an offspring of European rivalries and colonialism. In the 1920s the brown shirts of Germany’s former African colonial army become the uniform of a domestic legion of terror.

In the 1920s Benno, Anna and their children live as close neighbors to the demagogue who will become the Nazi leader. A slow-moving horror show envelops them in the years that follow.

In the 1930s and 1940s: Emigrating children, a pogrom, a new war, evictions, “resettlement” via a train ride east . . . desperate acts of resistance, arrest, trial – as the holocaust plays out— all up close and personal: A human story told through the voices of those who lived it.

Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history wherein tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness. Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky. O'Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue blood family's expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men—and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all.