Keith O'Brien

The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s — and won   Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi‑day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky. O’Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high‑school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue‑blood family’s expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men — and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all.   Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history in which tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness.

The staggering story of an unlikely band of mothers in the 1970s who discovered Hooker Chemical's deadly secret of Love Canal--exposing one of America's most devastating toxic waste disasters and sparking the modern environmental movement as we know it today. Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers loved their neighborhood on the east side of Niagara Falls. It had an elementary school, a playground, and rows of affordable homes. But in the spring of 1977, pungent odors began to seep into these little houses, and it didn't take long for worried mothers to identify the curious scent. It was the sickly sweet smell of chemicals. In this propulsive work of narrative storytelling, NYT journalist Keith O'Brien uncovers how Gibbs and Kenny exposed the poisonous secrets buried in their neighborhood. The school and playground had been built atop an old canal--Love Canal, it was called--that Hooker Chemical, the city's largest employer, had quietly filled with twenty thousand tons of toxic waste in the 1940s and 1950s. This waste was now leaching to the surface, causing a public health crisis the likes of which America had never seen before and sparking new and specific fears. Luella Kenny believed the chemicals were making her son sick. O'Brien braids together previously unknown stories of Hooker Chemical's deeds; the local newspaperman, scientist, and congressional staffer who tried to help; the city and state officials who didn't; and the heroic women who stood up to corporate and governmental indifference to save their families and their children. They would take their fight all the way to the top, winning support from the EPA, the White House, and even President Jimmy Carter. By the time it was over, they would capture America's imagination. Sweeping and electrifying, Paradise Falls brings to life a defining story from our past, laying bare the dauntless efforts of a few women who--years before Erin Brockovich took up the mantle-- fought to rescue their community and their lives from the effects of corporate pollution and laid foundation for the modern environmental movement as we know it today.

A page-turning work of narrative nonfiction chronicling the incredible story of one of America’s most iconic, charismatic, and still polarizing figures—baseball immortal Pete Rose—and an exquisite cultural history of baseball and America in the second half of the twentieth century Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn’t. In the 1980s Pete Rose came to be at the center of the biggest scandal in baseball history. Baseball no longer needed Pete Rose, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined Pete, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game. Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Drawing on first-hand interviews with Pete himself, his associates, as well we on investigators, FBI and court records, archives, a mountain of press coverage, Keith O’Brien chronicles how Pete fell so far from being America’s “great white hope.” It is Rose as we've never seen before. This is no ordinary sport biography, but cultural history at its finest. What O’Brien shows is that while Pete Rose didn’t change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change.