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The Confidence Men
- How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History
- Narrated by: Richard Elfyn
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.
Finalist for the Edgar® Award • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.” (The New York Times Book Review)
Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day, an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board - and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception - to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom.
A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause - and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War”, Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives.
Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
Critic reviews
“Tales of spunky prisoners of war suffering horrifying privation or outfoxing their sadistic or imbecilic captors are a staple of military history and the movies.... Fact or fiction, few of them can match the latest entry in the genre.... Margalit Fox’s The Confidence Men tells the tale of two Allied officers captured by the Turks during World War I who escaped their remote prison camp by pulling an ingenious and elaborate spiritualist con on the camp’s greedy commandant.” (The Wall Street Journal)
“The Confidence Men couldn’t have come along at a better time. This story of two unlikely con artists - young British officers who use a Ouija board to escape from a Turkish prisoner-of-war camp - is a true delight, guaranteed to lift the spirits of anyone eager to forget today’s realities and lose oneself in a beautifully written tale of an exciting and deeply moving real-life caper.” (Lynne Olson, author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War)
“Fox (Conan Doyle for the Defense), a former obituary writer for the New York Times, recounts in this marvelous history how two British army officers in WWI orchestrated ‘the most singular prison break ever recorded'.... Fox enriches her account with intriguing deep dives into the psychology of ‘coercive persuasion’, the mechanics of confidence games, and the history of spiritualism in the US and England. Readers will be mesmerized by this rich and rewarding tale.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
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Many people will remember Eric Liddell as the Olympic gold medalist from the Academy Award-winning film Chariots of Fire. Famously, Liddell would not run on Sunday because of his strict observance of the Christian Sabbath, and so he did not compete in his signature event, the 100 meters, at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He was the greatest sprinter in the world at the time, and his choice not to run was ridiculed by the British Olympic committee, his fellow athletes, and most of the world press.
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The challenge of a life lived for God's Glory
- By David on 06-30-16
By: Duncan Hamilton
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Naples '44
- By: Norman Lewis
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Naples '44 is an unflinching autobiographical account of a year in Naples after the armistice and Allied landings in Sorrento in 1943. Working as a British counterintelligence officer under the Allied occupation, Lewis documents the rich pageant of life in the city and its surrounding areas. There is suffering and squalor: Criminal gangs are on the rise, along with typhus and black market commerce, and the female population is forced into part-time prostitution. But there is farce and humor, too, witnessed in the Roman uncle paid handsomely simply to appear at funerals.
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Sharply observed, beautifully written, and deeply humane
- By cw on 11-13-23
By: Norman Lewis
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The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1
- An Experiment in Literary Investigation
- By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 25 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
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Should be required reading in US schools
- By Richard on 01-01-21
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Prisoners of the Castle
- An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis' Fortress Prison
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape.
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Another chapter of history brought to life by a master
- By Steve on 09-28-22
By: Ben Macintyre
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The Art of Resistance
- My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir
- By: Justus Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, 16-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south.
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Rosenberg, Please focus
- By Jess on 03-20-22
By: Justus Rosenberg
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Men at Arms
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first novel in Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback.
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Supposedly Humorous
- By Kindle Customer on 11-13-18
By: Evelyn Waugh
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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First into Nagasaki
- By: George Weller
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into the hospitals and consulting the doctors of the bomb's victims, Weller was the first to document its unprecedented long-range medical effects. He also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps, which rivaled those of the Nazis for cruelty and bested them for death count.
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First Into Nagasaki
- By Harold on 02-15-07
By: George Weller
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The Moth and the Mountain
- A True Story of Love, War, and Everest
- By: Ed Caesar
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: He will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit — completely alone.
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this is very misleading as most of it is wwone
- By steve on 12-01-20
By: Ed Caesar
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The Auschwitz Volunteer
- Beyond Bravery
- By: Witold Pilecki, Jarek Garlinski - translator
- Narrated by: Marek Probosz, Jarek Garlinski, Ken Kliban, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1940, the Polish Underground wanted to know what was happening inside the recently opened Auschwitz concentration camp. Polish army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be arrested by the Germans and report from inside the camp. His intelligence reports, smuggled out in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the "final solution" for Jews. Pilecki received brutal treatment until he escaped in April 1943; soon after, he wrote a brief report....
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The bar of manhood
- By Rhea on 09-22-13
By: Witold Pilecki, and others
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What Did You Do in the War, Sister?
- By: Dennis J. Turner
- Narrated by: Annie Pesch, Dennis Turner
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The book is a fictional memoir based on actual events. The inspiration for the book came from hundreds of letters and other accounts written by Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur who were living in German-occupied Belgium and Italy during World War Two. Turner created a composite character, Sister Christina, who is described as an Ohio farm girl who joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Namur to teach English and agricultural skills to young Catholic girls. Assigned to Belgium in 1939, she worked Nazi-occupied Belgium for the duration of World War Two.
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Great story very interesting.
- By Pamela J. Cogburn on 08-19-23
By: Dennis J. Turner
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The Wolves at the Door
- The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy
- By: Judith Pearson
- Narrated by: Patrice O’Neill
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. After watching Hitler roll over Poland and France, she enlisted to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to occupied France where, if captured, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Gestapo was all but assured.
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The narrator is ruining the book for me
- By Penni Khandi on 06-19-14
By: Judith Pearson
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Schindler's List
- By: Thomas Keneally
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden — Schindler’s Jews — to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil.
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really well done
- By Neil H. Greenberg on 03-09-19
By: Thomas Keneally
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A Woman of No Importance
- The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
- By: Sonia Purnell
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and - despite her prosthetic leg - helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.
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Maybe it’s the narrator?
- By Andrea on 09-18-19
By: Sonia Purnell
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What listeners say about The Confidence Men
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anthony
- 02-25-23
What a great story
Anybody who reads us book will be enthralled by the ingenuity of the two officers in the way in manner of their escape?
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- Martha Ressler
- 12-04-21
You think you don't like non-fiction?
Crack open The Confidence Men and see if it doesn't keep you turning pages all the way to the end. In addition to it being a compelling story, you end up learning a lot about the contradictions of the times -- late 19th century and early 20th century, when voices could, somehow, transmit through radio waves and the telephone. So why not telepathically?
Why shouldn't the dead speak to us?
These were the times in which Jones and Hill played their long, dangerous con in an attempt to escape from a Turkish prison.
And without being overt, what does this story tell us about those who believe the big lies and the con men of today?
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- Ross DeSautel
- 07-16-22
Too long
If I were a prisoner of war, I would never go through all of that for an attempted escape. I would either be better off as a prisoner, or dead from any other kind of escape. You must have a propensity to tell long boring useless stories to be able to go through all of that for so long to make an attempted escape. Not held in interest.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Marky Maypo
- 10-17-21
Unbelievable
Truth is often stranger than fiction . This is mind-blowing with fantastic narration. Wow!
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- Randy
- 04-09-24
Long haul to get to the story
The performance was good. I thought the story was funny and the two guys are brilliant. I think it was drawn out quite long - this could have been a cracked.com badass of the week post and covered it just fine. But overall, it was an enjoyable listen. I might even listen to it again some day.
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- Stuart Jump
- 02-27-22
Mixed feelings
I loved the parts about what the prisoners did to con everyone, but the time spent discussing the history of spiritualism and the history of the psychology behind this were too long and detracted from the book’s effectiveness.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Marjorie
- 06-20-21
Everything you wanted to know about spiritualism
This is the true story of how 2 British prisoners of war (WWI) in Turkey manipulated their captors over a period of years in order to escape captivity. There are occasional redundancies, but in addition to telling an entertaining yarn, it provides a short history of mental trickery and interpretations of why people in the early 20th Century were so susceptible.
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- Paul Schneider
- 09-10-22
How to Play a Long Con
A great adventure in obscure history, a true story of war prisoners playing a long con - successfully on their captors. Well nearrated and easy to listen.
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1 person found this helpful
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- DASH
- 02-10-23
I’m debating listening again
At the end, there was a great deal of interesting information though throughout the story I debated on whether or not to keep listening because it was difficult for me to follow.
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- thaichicken
- 01-17-23
home run as usual
Margarlit Fox has never failed to absolutely entrance me with her intricate weaving of multiple narratives. This was a fascinating look into the (relatively) modern histories of con games, communications technologies, war, and spiritualism, all wrapped up neatly in the particular story of a handful of particular people in a particular situation. Amazing.
And Richard Elfyn's voice acting was excellent. Very smooth and pleasant narrative with accents that added to the ability to hear dialogue changes.
Additionally, I appreciated that in the preface(?), a) Fox explained her decision to use historical place names, which I think was an excellent one; and b) when Elfyn read the variant spellings, he over-pronounced them and even specified "with an H". I am constantly disappointed by audiobooks that stick so literally to the text that visual information is lost. I don't know if those specifications were included in the original text or if the audio producers added them in for clarity for the listening audience, but I *deeply* appreciate it!
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1 person found this helpful