Brooke L. Blower is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of the award-winning Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (OUP, 2011) as well as the co-editor of The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn and volume 3 of the Cambridge History of America and the World. She is a founding editor of the journal Modern American History.
Blower shows us the Second World War from wholly novel and thought-provoking points of view. Recounting the doomed transatlantic flight of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper in 1943, Blower re-creates the strikingly worldly view of American civilians borne aloft and into a global cataclysm. Blower's original research and powerful prose carry us along on the journey, making us feel as if we know these people and allowing us to worry about their fates as if their story were happening right in front of us. * Eric Rauchway, author of Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal * In this brilliant, creative, and compelling work, Brooke Blower brings readers into World War II through the lives of travelers on an ill-fated transatlantic flight, allowing readers to see the world on the edge of war. The author's beautiful writing and astonishing range of sources make this book a model of the integration of biography and global history. * Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences * By expertly blending the international and the personal, Brooke Blower gives us a new and fascinating way to understand American reactions to the Second World War. This powerfully written and originally researched book shows the complexities and contradictions of America's rise to global superpower. Americans in a World at War is a prime example of the new and exciting generation of scholarly analyses of World War II. * Michael S. Neiberg, author of When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Relationship *