book club resources

Below you'll find a short essay on how (and why) I wrote the book.

If your group is interested in the historical background of this fascinating and largely forgotten chapter of World War II, I've drawn up a short primer -- and warning -- about balloon bombs.

For discussion questions, consult the Penguin Random House Reader's Guide for The Cloud Atlas.

How (and why) I wrote the book

People usually interrupt me with two questions when I start telling them about this book. One, are the balloons real? That's easy; they are. The next question is tougher: when did you first learn about them?

The strange thing is that I don't ever remember not knowing about them. I'm a compulsive reader of footnotes and a cataloger of curiosities. Long before the internet, I followed old-fashioned hyperlinks through libraries and museums: a citation here would lead me to a source there and that source to another book or article, and then on to another one, and soon enough, the day was shot. I'd gone to the library to look up something on the Sierras, say, and emerged knowing something about the house where Grant died. 

It must have been during one of those forays that I first came across the very strange story of WWII Japan's paper balloon bombs (also called fire balloons, or Fu-Go weapons). But I'm sure I didn't come across much of a story. Part of the reason the balloons remain such a secret today is that two entire nations were committed to keeping them a secret back then: Japan didn't want America to know where the balloons were coming from, and America didn't want Japan to know that their balloons were, in fact, reaching North America. The U.S. banned all news reports of balloons--you can read more about this in the site's "About the balloons" section--and though the censorship order was later rescinded, silence followed for decades. 

There have been a few exceptions. In 1996, John McPhee published a New Yorker  article about forensic geology (the article is collected in his book, Irons in the Fire). One part of the article dealt with the balloons, or more specifically, with the sand the balloons used as ballast: by examining the unique makeup of this sand, US government geologists were able to determine the balloons' launch sites. And in the 1970s, Robert C. Mikesh, a retired Air Force officer and National Air and Space Museum curator, wrote a slim volume, Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America. It remains the most comprehensive history of this strange weapon.