Bøker av Jack El-Hai

The dread, the drama, and the hope of a break in one of the country’s oldest active missing-child investigations ┬áOn a cold November afternoon in 1951, three young boys went out to play in Farview Park in north Minneapolis. The Klein brothers—Kenneth Jr., 8; David, 6; and Danny, 4—never came home. When two caps turned up on the ice of the Mississippi River, investigators concluded that the boys had drowned and closed the case. The boys’ parents were unconvinced, hoping against hope that their sons would still be found. Sixty long years would pass before two sheriff’s deputies, with new information in hand and the FBI on board, could convince the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to reopen the case.This is the story of that decades-long ordeal, one of the oldest known active missing-child investigations, told by a writer whose own research for an article in 1998 sparked new interest in the boys’ disappearance. Beginning in 2012, when deputies Jessica Miller and Lance Salls took up the Kleins’ cause, author Jack El-Hai returns to the mountain of clues amassed through the years, then follows the trail traced over time by the boys’ indefatigable parents, right back to those critical moments in 1951. Told in brisk, longform journalism style, The Lost Brothers captures the Kleins’ initial terror and confusion but also the unstinting effort, with its underlying faith, that carried them from psychics to reporters to private investigators and TV producers—and ultimately produced results that cast doubt on the drowning verdict and even suggested possible suspects in the boys’ abduction. An intimate portrait of a parent’s worst nightmare and its terrible toll on a family, the book is also a genuine mystery, spinning out suspense at every missed turn or potential lead, along with its hope for resolution in the end.

In 1945, an improbable relationship between the fallen Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, and ambitious US Army physician, Douglas Kelley, becomes a hazardous quest into the nature of evil, amid the devastation of Europe at the end of World War II

The first book to tour forgotten landmarks throughout the state of Minnesota.Believe it or not, Minnesota’s architectural landscape has included a house made from the fuselage of a B-29 bomber, a hotel that spent its final years as a chicken hatchery, a Civil War cemetery, a treehouse built and occupied year-round by an eccentric university professor, and a railway that once carried passengers up Duluth’s steep incline from Lake Superior. They are all gone now, along with countless houses, parks, bridges, theaters, sports stadiums, courthouses, and farm buildings in which Minnesotans have worked, played, and lived their lives. Though other books have looked at the lost architecture of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Jack El-Hai’s Lost Minnesota is the first book to tell the stories of buildings and landmarks from rural and small-town Minnesota, as well as those of the residential and suburban areas of the state’s largest cities. From Rochester’s Hotel Zumbro and the Charles H. Mayo House to the Hastings Spiral Bridge and the Lyceum Theater of Duluth, El-Hai rediscovers a lost landscape and the values and lifestyle of a bygone era. He tours not only Twin Cities buildings, such as the Fairoaks mansion, the Wilder Baths, and the Beyrer Brewery, but also its sites, such as the Wonderland amusement park, in order to re-create not only where but how Minnesotans lived. Lost Minnesota presents eighty-nine beautifully illustrated stories about these fascinating places and those who built them, lived in them, and tore them down. This is a book sure to delight the Minnesota history enthusiast and anyone who is curious about the state’s changing urban, small-town, and rural landscapes.

Praise for The Lobotomist "Written with such clarity and engaging detail that a reader has difficulty in putting it down. " --The New York Review of Books "One of the many virtues of El-Hai's text is the rich detail he provides about Freeman's life and ideas. " --Los Angeles Times "Fascinating...