PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW OF DEAD AIR
Publishers Weekly, August 8,2024
In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove (Writing Gatsby) chronicles the mass hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens' poisonous gas, and even one woman's attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria's scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that "Americans were essentially gullible morons" and earned Welles the national recognition he'd yearned for. It's a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. (Nov.)
Release Oct 30 2024
WRITING GATSBY RELEASE OCT 1 2022!
"This book uses the Fort Lauderdale incident as a frame, but its real subject is mass shootings in the U.S. . . . . Hazelgrove is a talented writer, and it is impossible to read this deeply personal, questioning, powerful book without feeling sadness both for the victims of mass shootings but also, perhaps counterintuitively, for the shooters themselves, who might have followed a different course if they had received help when they needed it."
—Booklist
William Hazelgrove is the National Bestselling author of ten novels and twelve nonfiction titles. His books have received starred reviews in Publisher Weekly Kirkus, Booklist, Book of the Month Selections, ALA Editors Choice Awards Junior Library Guild Selections, Literary Guild Selections, History Book Club Selections, History Book Club Bestsellers, Distinguished Book Award. and optioned for the movies. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace. He has written articles and reviews for USA Today, The Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications and has been featured on NPR All Things Considered. The New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, CSPAN, USA Today, World News Tonight have all covered his books with features. His book Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith in development He has two forthcoming books. Dead Air The Night Orson Welles Terrified America, Hemingways Attic Hell and Glory in Cuba and the Writing of Old Man and the Sea