Blaine Harden
Harden is an author and journalist who worked for The Washington Post for 28 years as a correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and writer for the Times Magazine. He has contributed to The Economist and PBS Frontline.
Harden's newest book, "Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the
American West." New York Times columnist Tim Egan calls it a "terrific" deconstruction of a Big Lie about the West. The LA Times calls the book "terrifically readable." The Spokesman Review (Spokane, Wa.) raves that Murder at the Mission is "a richly detailed and expertly researched account of how a concocted story...became a part of American legend.
Harden is also the author of "King of Spies" (Viking/Penguin 2017), "The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot" (Viking/Penguin, 2015), "Escape From Camp 14" (Viking/Penguin 2012) and "A River Lost" (Norton, revised and updated edition 2012).
“[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot.”
“I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.”
“His first memory is an execution.”