Bruce Henderson (author)

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Bruce Henderson is an American journalist and author of more than 30 nonfiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, And the Sea Will Tell. His most recent New York Times bestseller is Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler. [1] Henderson's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian and Czech. Henderson won the Tenth Annual Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize and a $50,000 award bestowed in recognition of "the best English language book published in 2022 in the field of American military history" for Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II (Knopf). [2] A member of the Authors Guild, Henderson has taught reporting and writing courses at USC School of Journalism and Stanford University.

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Born in Oakland, California, he served in the United States Navy during the Vietnam War, and later attended college on the G.I. Bill. He worked as an investigative reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner , and was an associate editor at New West and California magazines. His work has appeared in many other periodicals, such as Smithsonian Magazine ("Cook vs. Peary", April 2009), Esquire , and Playboy .

Other notable books

Henderson's 2018 New York Times bestseller Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler, [1] is the true story of the German-born Jews, dubbed the Ritchie Boys, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, came of age in America, and returned to Europe at enormous personal risk as members of the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Service to play a key role in the Allied victory. Sons and Soldiers has been published in twelve foreign countries. USA Today called it "thrilling...a spellbinding account of extraordinary men at war". [3]

Henderson's national bestseller Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War [4] is the story of U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who was shot down over Laos in January 1966 and escaped from a Pathet Lao POW camp six months later. Henderson and Dengler served together on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger (CVA-61) in 1965–66.

Henderson wrote Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II, [5] a narrative nonfiction account of the February 23, 1945, Raid at Los Baños that freed more than 2,000 civilian prisoners of war – most of them American men, women and children, as well as other Allied nationalities – from an Imperial Japanese Army internment camp located 40 miles south of Manila. Rescue at Los Baños has received positive reviews from the trade and the media. Kirkus Reviews called it "riveting." [6]

His true crime book And the Sea Will Tell , a collaboration with Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, was a #1 New York Times hardcover bestseller and highly rated CBS miniseries. [7] "The book succeeds on all counts", reported the Los Angeles Times on February 17, 1991. "The final pages are some of the most suspenseful in trial literature." [8] Henderson followed with another true crime title, Trace Evidence: The Hunt for the I-5 Serial Killer.

Henderson's book True North: Peary, Cook, and The Race to the Pole examined the ongoing controversy as to which explorer reached the North Pole first: Robert Peary in 1909 or Frederick Cook in 1908. Publishers Weekly commented: "This adventure yarn delivers as both a cautionary tale and a fitting memorial to polar exploration." [9] Henderson's other Arctic title, Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition, tells the story of the ill-fated Charles Francis Hall expedition to the North Pole.

Henderson co-authored Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality , the autobiography of African-American theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett, and Ring of Deceit: Inside the Biggest Sports and Bank Scandal in History, which chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of boxing promoter and convicted swindler Harold Smith.

Partial bibliography

Film adaptations

The four-hour CBS television miniseries adaptation of And the Sea Will Tell was filmed in Vancouver, B.C. and Tahiti, and starred Rachel Ward, Richard Crenna, and James Brolin. Ring of Deceit: Inside the Biggest Sports and Bank Scandal in History is currently under option for development as a film or limited series, as is True North: Peary, Cook and the Race to the Pole.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Peary</span> American Arctic explorer (1856–1920)

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Frederick Albert Cook was an American explorer, physician and ethnographer, who is most known for allegedly being the first to reach the North Pole on April 21, 1908. A competing claim was made a year later by Robert Peary, though both men's accounts have since been fiercely disputed; in December 1909, after reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled his claim unproven. Nonetheless, in 1911, Cook published a memoir of the expedition in which he maintained the veracity of his assertions. In addition, he also claimed to have been the first person to reach the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, a claim which has since been similarly discredited. Though he may not have achieved either Denali or the North Pole, his was the first and only expedition where a United States national discovered an Arctic island, Meighen Island.

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<i>And the Sea Will Tell</i> Book by Vincent Bugliosi

And the Sea Will Tell is a true crime book by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson. The nonfiction book recounts an apparent double murder on Palmyra Atoll although only one body was ever found; the subsequent arrest, trial, and conviction of Wesley G. "Buck Duane" Walker; and the acquittal of his girlfriend, Stephanie Stearns, whom Bugliosi and Leonard Weinglass had defended. The book went to No. 1 on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list in March 1991 and is still in print as a trade paperback and ebook.

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Dieter Dengler was a German-born United States Navy aviator who was shot down over Laos and captured during the Vietnam War. After six months of imprisonment and torture, and 23 days on the run, he became only the second captured US airman to escape during the war. Of the seven prisoners of war who escaped together from the Pathet Lao prison camp in Laos, only he and Thai citizen Phisit Intharathat survived. After the war, he worked as a test pilot for private aircraft and as a commercial airline pilot.

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The Angels of Bataan were the members of the United States Army Nurse Corps and the United States Navy Nurse Corps who were stationed in the Philippines at the outset of the Pacific War and served during the Battle of the Philippines (1941–1942). When Bataan and Corregidor fell, 11 navy nurses, 66 army nurses, and 1 nurse-anesthetist were captured and imprisoned in and around Manila. They continued to serve as a nursing unit while prisoners of war. After years of hardship, they were finally liberated in February 1945.

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<i>Hero Found</i>

Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War is a 2010 non-fiction book by author Bruce Henderson. Hero Found is a biography of Vietnam War hero Dieter Dengler, a German-born United States Navy naval aviator who endured six months of imprisonment and torture before being rescued. Dengler survived 23 days in the jungle after escaping from a Pathet Lao prison camp.

Mark Felton is a British author, historian, and YouTuber. Felton has written over a dozen nonfiction books. He runs several channels on YouTube covering different historical subjects of the 20th and 21st century, mainly related to World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He has been a lecturer at the University of Essex. In 2014, he published Zero Night, a book about the 1942 mass allied escape from the German prisoner-of-war camp Oflag VI-B.

References

  1. 1 2 "Overview - Bruce Henderson". BruceHendersonBooks.com. Archived from the original on October 20, 2020. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  2. ↑ "Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize". www.gilderlehrman.org.
  3. ↑ "How German Jews joined the U.S. Army and helped beat the Nazis". USAToday.com. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  4. ↑ "HarperCollins US". www.HarperCollins.com. Archived from the original on June 10, 2013. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  5. ↑ "Overview - Bruce Henderson". BruceHendersonBooks.com. Archived from the original on May 21, 2015. Retrieved November 17, 2017.
  6. ↑ "RESCUE AT LOS BAOS by Bruce Henderson | Kirkus". www.kirkusreviews.com. Archived from the original on 2015-05-21.
  7. ↑ "And the Sea Will Tell". February 24, 1991. Retrieved November 17, 2017– via www.IMDb.com.
  8. ↑ Bugliosi, Vincent; Henderson, Bruce (December 22, 1991). And the Sea Will Tell. Ivy Books. ISBN   0804109176.
  9. ↑ Henderson, Bruce (February 17, 2006). True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN   0393327388.
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