Please join us, in partnership with Buxton Books, in welcoming our very own local 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, James Scott, as he shares with us the first ever published in English Air Force archives and oral histories through the pages of Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb.
Tickets are $10 for CLS members and $15 for guests. Free for students by calling the number listed below and showing a valid ID at check in.
To purchase tickets, click here or call 843-723-9912.
Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots, bombardiers and Japanese survivors, after the most destructive air attack in history, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account of the night when nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945.
Black Snow is the story of the devastating operation – in which killed more than 100,000 men, women, and children – that was orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.
About James M. Scott:
A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, James M. Scott is the author of Rampage, which was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the editors at Amazon, Kirkus, and Military Times and was chosen as a finalist for the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History by the New York Historical Society. His other works include Target Tokyo, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist, The War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty, which won the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award. Scott lives with his wife and two children in Mt. Pleasant, SC.
Buxton Book is offering $5 off Black Snow book sales at the event.