Quotes from Mitchell Zuckoff

THE SLED DOG TEAM PASSES THE PBY DUMBO

I kept up the bluff, hoping that I might eventually hit upon some workable plan to pay all of my creditors in full.

where nothing seemed to change, war animated communities and bound people to one another. It satisfied a basic human need for festival.

longitude 65 degrees, 15 minutes north, and latitude 41 degrees, 18 minutes west.

Securities Exchange Company

For girls, war meant having the upper halves of one or more fingers chopped off each time a close relative was killed, to satisfy the dead person's ghost.

Irish fishermen's prayer: "Dear God, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.

Manhattan had the same population density as Greenland, its population would be two.

The jungle had no predatory mammals, but rodents and small marsupials scurried in the underbrush.

Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I'm on an airplane that's been hijacked. If things don't go well, and it's not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you. I want you to do good, go have a good time. Same to my parents and everybody. And I just totally love you, and [anticipating heaven or an afterlife] I'll see you when you get there. 'Bye, babe. Hope I'll call you.

Then, just as Brian Sweeney had tried to reassure his wife and mother, Peter Hanson sought to comfort his father: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it'll be very fast.

firefighters cannot extinguish a fire in a twenty- or thirty-thousand-square-foot open floor area in a high-rise building. A fire company advancing a 2½-inch hoseline with a 1¼-inch nozzle discharges only three hundred gallons per minute and can extinguish only about twenty-five hundred square feet of fire.

Jim pulls out his iPhone and uses a digital compass to find the direction

Eventually, more than 150,000 women served as WACs during World War II, making them the first women other than nurses to join the U.S. Army.

the natives "were puzzled as to why the light-skinned men, who must really be ghosts or spirits, had no women with them.

Changes in the valley during the ensuing decades have been dramatic, but whether for better or worse is a matter of debate.

God damn it, let's take our pants down," Walter told his men, "and show them that we're men, not women. I'm tired of this." Walter stripped off his shirt, pants, and underwear. His men followed suit. They walked around nude for the next several hours while the natives wandered among them, more modestly attired in penis gourds.

planners hauled out their

whether a C-47, pulling a loaded glider in thin air, had the horsepower to climb to roughly ten thousand feet quickly enough to make it through the pass that led out of the valley. In addition, the pilots of both aircraft would have to contend with

Within six minutes of the crash,35 the first person fell or jumped. At least 110 more lives would end that way from the upper stories of the North Tower.

To himself, Ponzi rationalized the difference between his Securities Exchange Company and copycat upstarts: "Perhaps my activities were not entirely within the law," he allowed. "But my intent was honest. I was in a critical position and I had fallen into it without any intention to do wrong. Now that I was in it, I was trying my hardest to pull myself out of it, without hurting my investors.

Ronson Aviation hangar at the Trenton-Mercer Airport.

In the remarkable seven months since it had opened for business, the Securities Exchange Company had amassed thirty thousand investors and $9.6 million. All Ponzi had to do to keep them satisfied was to pay them nearly $15 million in return.

Alone on the floor of his elevator car, oblivious to everything beyond the walls of his box, Chris Young occasionally heard loud cries amid sirens and fire alarms. Nothing sounded like human agony, only some kind of vague emergency unfolding nearby. He knew nothing of planes or fires or people falling and jumping to their deaths.