Keith O’Brien Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Keith O’Brien is a published author who has written multiple books. He is the winner of the PEN America Award for best biography. Over the years, he has contributed to several different publications.

Keith has served as a previous staff writer for The Boston Globe and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He has won several awards during his time as a newspaper reporter, which includes the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. He has also been a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. In addition he has been hailed by the New York Times Book Review for having what was deemed a ‘keen reportorial eye’ and a writing style that was ‘lyrical’.

His writing has appeared in places such as the Atlantic, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, on National Public Radio, The Boston Globe, Politico, Slate, the Oxford American, The Washington Post, Esquire.com, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been a long time contributor to National Public Radio and as such has appeared on shows like Morning Edition, Marketplace, Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and This American Life, as well as others.

He is a Midwesterner through birth but grew up in Cincinnati. He attended Northwestern University and graduated. He is married and lives in New Hampshire with his family, which includes his wife, their two children, their two dogs, and their two cats.

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History is a 2018 book by Keith O’Brien. This book was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the category of Readers’ Favorite History & Biography. If you have been looking for a good nonfiction book to take on, this is a fantastic candidate.

This is a story that has not been focused on like this before and is the story of five women who fought for their right to compete against the men in the national air races of the twenties and thirties and won.

In the United States, airplane racing was the most popular and one of the most dangerous sports to occupy the imagination and the entertainment arena of many Americans in the time between the world wars. Airplane racing would pull huge crowds as thousands of fans went to multi-day events, and cities would compete with each other for the chance to host them.

The pilots who conducted these races were celebrated, hailed by so many as being the dashing and courageous heroes who were taking on death and looking at it in the face. The men were viewed as being in a positive light, but the women themselves were frequently ridiculed instead of being praised for flying. The press even put them in a poor light, showing them as conducting silly efforts to try and partake in what was considered to be a mostly manly venture.

Fly Girls is able to go over this time period in detail and tell the stories of five women who are impressive and remarkable in every way. The book also is able to tell how a group of women came together to break gender expectations and the prejudice that was attempting to keep them from the skies and fought for their place in this sport and past time.

Florence Klingensmith is one, a high school dropout working for a Fargo dry cleaner. She is joined by Ruth Elder, a divorcee from Alabama. Ruth Nichols was trying to rise above the expectations of her family and Louise Thaden was the mother to two young children and started out selling coal in Wichita. Amelia Earhart was the most famous out of the ladies. They came together and did whatever they could to get the opportunity to race men, with one of them winning the hardest race of them all in 1936.

Intriguing and all the more interesting because this is a true untold story, this book takes in a piece of history where trail blazing women took on all types of obstacles and went after what they wanted because they believed they deserved it and achieved greatness along the way.

Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe is a 2022 book by Keith O’Brien. This may not be something that you have ever heard of, but it is an incredible story of the group of mothers in the seventies who discovered Hooker Chemical’s Love Canal, a deadly secret and one of the most horrible toxic waste disasters in the USA. It would also lead to the modern environmental movement as it is known today.

Lois Gibbs, Luella Kenny, and other mothers who lived in that area really loved living in their neighborhood in Niagara Falls’ east side. It had everything that they needed, from a playground to an elementary school to rows of homes that were very affordable. But things changed in 1977 in the spring, when strange odors began coming into the houses. The mothers were concerned with this and set out to try and ID the scent, which unbeknownst to them was the sweet smell of chemicals.

In this narrative work of storytelling, Keith O’Brien is a New York Times journalist who often gets to the bottom of how Gibbs and Kenny were able to expose the poisonous secrets that were in there. The playground and the school were all constructed on top of the old Love Canal. Hooker Chemical was the largest employer in the city and had filled it with 20,000 tons of toxic waste in the forties and fifties, and now it was coming to the surface and kicking off a public health crisis like no other.

The public was scared and Luella Kenny thought it was these very chemicals that were making her son sick. In this fascinating book, O’Brien pulls together stories of Hooker Chemicals deed and outlines those who tried to help and the officials who did not. It also talks about the brave women who chose to stand up to corporate and governmental apathy in defense of their families and children. They would take this battle to the top and get support from the EPA, White House, and Jimmy Carter.

An electric tale of a real story from America’s past and one that readers won’t want to miss, check out Paradise Falls to see what happens!