Hampton Sides

(Wade) Hampton Sides (born 1962) is an American historian, author and journalist. He is the author of Americana, Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.

Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Men's Journal, and The Washington Post. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing.

Appearances

A native of Memphis, Sides attended PDS Memphis^[5] and Memphis University School, and graduated from Yale with a BA in history. Sides lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife Anne Goodwin Sides, a journalist and former NPR editor, and their three boys, all soccer players. He is a past fellow of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Japan Society, and an Edwards Media Fellow at Stanford University. He is an advisory board member of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Sides has guest-lectured at Columbia, Yale, Stanford, SMU, Colorado College, the Autry National Center of the American West, the American Embassy in Manila, Rehoboth Christian School, and the National World War II Museum, among other venues and institutions. He has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as American Experience, the Today show, Book TV, the History Channel, Fresh Air, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Colbert Report, Imus in the Morning, and NPR's All Things Considered.

Books

Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday, 2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City, praised Ghost Soldiers as a "Great Escape for the Pacific Theater," and Esquire called it "the greatest World War II story never told." The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel, and was partially the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, The Great Raid (along with William Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan). Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction and the Discover Award from Barnes & Noble. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials.

Blood and Thunder (Doubleday, 2006) focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. A critic for the Los Angeles Times described Blood and Thunder as "stunning, haunting, and lyrical," while The Washington Post called it "riveting, monumental...authoritative and masterfully told." Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time Magazine, and was selected as that year's best history title by the History Book Club and the Western Writers of America. Blood and Thunder was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program American Experience and is currently under development for the screen.

Hellhound on His Trail (Doubleday 2010) is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history to capture James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty in 1969 and served the rest of his life in prison. Sides, who is a native of Memphis, is the first historian to make use of a new digital archive in that city, called the B. Venson Hughes Collection, which contains more than 20,000 documents and photos, many of them rare or never before published. Sides’ research forms much of the basis for PBS’s documentary "Roads to Memphis", which originally aired May 3, 2010, on the award-winning program, American Experience.

Hellhound on His Trail reached #6 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the book "spellbinding...bold, dynamic, unusually vivid," while a reviewer in The New York Times Book Review suggested that Hellhound "may be the first book on King that owes less to Taylor Branch than Robert Ludlum." Time Magazine said Hellhound "unfolds like a mystery—one read not for the ending but for all the missteps and near misses along the way." Critic Laura Miller, writing on Salon.com, described Hellhound as a "meticulous yet driving account that is in essence a true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genre." David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer-winning biography of King, wrote in The Washington Post that Hellhound was "a carefully constructed true-crime narrative" and "a memorable and persuasive portrait" that "makes a valuable contribution to the historical record."

Hellhound on His Trail has been optioned by Universal Studios and is now said to be under development, with a screenplay reportedly written by Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden.

Future Works

As of 2015, Hampton Sides is working on a book for Doubleday about 1950, the early days of the Cold War, and the harrowing, heroic Korean War Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

Selected Journalism

• The New York Times Book Review; 'On Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson'.^[6]
• National Geographic; "Science Seeks to Unlock Marijuana's Secret".^[7]
• National Geographic; "Unseen Titanic".^[8]
• National Geographic; "Russian Refuge".^[9]
• National Geographic; "1,000 Days in the Ice".^[10]
• Outside; "Tracing the Steps of Lost Explorers in Miserable, Beautiful Siberia".^[11]
• Outside; "The Man Who Saw Too Much".^[12]
• Outside; "Bear Grylls Plays Dirty".^[13]
• Outside; "Anyone for a Dip?".^[14]
• Outside; "The Birdman Drops In".^[15]
• Outside; "Wake-Up Call".^[16]
• Outside; "Quadzilla".^[17]
• Outside; The Place Where Two Fell Off.^[18]
• Men's Journal; "The First to Die".^[19]
• Bicycling; "Life's Rich Pageant".^[20]
• The Dallas Morning News; "Decades after assassinations, Memphis and Dallas remain hostages of history".^[21]
• The American Scholar; "Frozen Assets".^[22]
• Newsweek; "The Fall of Greg Mortensen and Our Longing for Heroes".^[23]
• The New Yorker; "National Defense".^[24]
• Garden & Gun; "City Portrait: Memphis, Tennessee".^[25]

Bibliography

• Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim's Progress Through Eight American Subcultures (1992) ISBN 0-688-09049-4 OCLC 26216643
• Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission (2001) ISBN 0-385-49564-1 OCLC 45835493
• Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison and Other Urgent Inquiries into the Odd Nature of Nature: The Best of Outside Magazine's "The Wild File" New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-393-32150-9 OCLC 45715852
• Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier (2004) ISBN 1-400-03355-1 OCLC 53289674
• Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (2006) ISBN 0-385-50777-1 OCLC 70045754^[26]
• Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History (2010) ISBN 0-385-52392-0 OCLC 458738471
• In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette. Doubleday. 2014. ISBN 9780385535380. OCLC 883257804. ^[27][28][29]

References

External links

External media

Audio
In 1879, Explorers Set Sail To Solve Arctic Mystery, Once And For All, NPR, August 02, 2014
Hampton Sides: “In the Kingdom of Ice”, Diane Rehm Show, Aug 14 2014
Interview with NPR's Fresh Air, 10-28
Video
Booknotes interview with Sides on Ghost Soldiers, September 30, 2001.

• Official website
• Hampton Sides articles for Outside Magazine
• Doubleday website for Sides's history, Blood and Thunder
• Website for Sides's anthology of journalism, Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier
• Interview at Outside magazine, 10-06
• Interview on Blood and Thunder at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library
• Appearances on C-SPAN