The Bomber Mafia is an innovative audio book with music, sound effects and archival clips as well as a paperback. Gladwell’s easy conversational style works well in both formats, and his admiration for the Bomber Mafia shines through. His portraits of individuals are compelling.

A kind of love song to the United States Air Force, which is surprising, because it is the least romantic of our armed services, with leaders who focus on technology, not tradition.

... there are books whose fusion of factual inaccuracy and moral sophistry is so total that they can only be written by Malcolm Gladwell.

... [an] intriguing but insubstantial little book.

The Bomber Mafia is a remarkable audiobook, and a work of art. Mr. Gladwell has a mesmerizing voice and has assembled his various materials with rare skill: Technical explanations, introductions of the main characters (including Norden, Hansell and LeMay), quotes from the airmen, and interviews with later historians all flow together naturally.

It’s indeed hard to imagine a more conventional account of the air war against Japan. In the questions it asks, the sources it uses, and the voices it amplifies, The Bomber Mafia offers an account virtually indistinguishable from the consensus position on the firebombings of urban Japan. It takes some of the most oft-repeated fallacies about the shift to area bombing and wraps them in a shiny new package.

Gladwell sincerely seems to believe his ending happened. That is, he believes the slaughter by US bombers of hundreds of thousands of Japanese people forced Tokyo to surrender by breaking their will to fight. In his mind, the saturation bombing of the Japanese was not only justifiable, it was also commendable.

There’s a scene in the 2011 film Moneyball where Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is mentoring young Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) on how to cut a professional baseball player from the roster: bluntly, without euphemism. 'Would you rather,' he asks, 'get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?' Imagine, if you will, that this was not a rhetorical question or an analogy about firing someone but rather a serious, literal question. Now imagine 206 pages of this, and you have a sense of what it’s like to read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a nasty, brutish book—if it’s also short, it’s not nearly short enough. It is a breathless and narratively riveting story.

Another Gladwell everything-you-thought-you-knew-was-wrong page-turner.

Gladwell...delivers a ruminative, anecdotal account of what led up to the deadliest air raid of WWII.