Annie Jacobsen Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Terror in the Skies | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Area 51 | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Operation Paperclip | (2014) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Pentagon's Brain | (2015) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Phenomena | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Surprise, Kill, Vanish | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
First Platoon | (2021) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Nuclear War: A Scenario | (2024) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Annie Jacobsen is a New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist who is known for her writing on war, government secrecy, US national security, and weapons.
The author went to Princeton University and St. Paul’s School where she studied Greek and wrote with the likes of Paul Auster and Joyce Carol Oates.
During her time at Princeton, she was the ice hockey team’s captain. After graduating from college, she would go on to become a Los Angeles Times Magazine contributing editor until it was shut down in 2013.
Jacobsen published Area 51 her debut novel in 2011 and has become quite a popular author since then. Several of her works including “Operation Paperclip” and “The Pentagon’s Brain” have since gone on to become New York Times best-selling titles.
“Area 51” her debut work has become one of her most popular and has so far been published in more than half a dozen languages. It has also been optioned and is due to be made into an AMC scripted TV series by the director of the likes of X Files Chris Carter and Gael Anne Hurd of Terminator and the Walking Dead.
Jacobsen currently makes her home in Los Angels where she lives with Kevin her husband and their two sons.
Outside of her literary writing, Annie Jacobsen has appeared on many media platforms and TV programs from Joe Rogan to PBS Newshour. On these platforms, she has been an invited guest discussing anything from national security, war, government secrecy, and weapons.
She has also produced and written for TV with her most prominent works being on CBSs Clarice and Amazon’s Jack Ryan. In 2019 her work Surprise, Kill, Vanish was among the Apple audiobook platform’s most popular works.
“The Pentagon’s Brain” which she published in 2015 is the work that has received the most awards over the years including a Pulitzer. Other gongs she has won include 2014 best no fiction by Publishers Weekly, Apple iBooks, and The Boston Globe.
She has come to be known as a sometimes controversial and internationally acclaimed writer. Annie Jacobsen also has a reputation for writing sensational books dealing with all manner of popular conspiracies.
Jacobsen is also known as the author of a controversial article about an incident on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in which thirteen foreign nationals were wrongly arrested.
Annie Jacobsen’s novel “Area 51” is a work set on one of the most famous military bases on the globe. The funny thing about it is that the military installation does not exist.
Found an odd seventy miles south of Las Vegas in the desert of Nevada the US government has never acknowledged its existence. However, the base has captivated the imagination of all manner of conspiracy theorists for decades.
Hypotheses and myths about Area 51 have been around for years for the most part due to the secrecy around it. According to some theorists, it is home to nuclear facilities, underground tunnels, and even aliens. Some believe it was the location for the filming of the lunar landing.
For the most part, the prevalence of these theories arises from the fact that no insider credible enough has ever come out to offer information about it.
Annie Jacobsen the author was provided exclusive access to nineteen men that had been insiders a the installation for decades before retiring. These included more than 100 intelligence and military personnel, engineers, pilots, and scientists that lived and worked at Area 51 for a long time.
In this work, Jacobszen gives insights into what really happens in the Nevada desert from pursuing the War on Terror to the construction of supersonic jets and the testing of nuclear weapons.
“Operation Paperclip” by Annie Jacobsen is set in the chaos following the Second World War. It was a time when the American government had to deal with a lot of difficult decisions, one of which was how to handle the brilliant scientific minds from the Third Reich.
These were the people that had been responsible for crafting what had once been an indomitable war machine that had captured Europe’s imagination.
This would result in the implementation of a decades-long covet project nicknamed “Operation Paperclip.” This was a project aimed at bringing some of the most brilliant minds and their families to the US from Germany.
Many of the targeted scientists had stood trial at Nuremberg for war crimes and one was even convicted on charges of slavery and mass murder. They have also been involved in major advances in the US space program, medical treatments, and rocketry.
The work draws on extensive and exclusive interviews with many of the family members of the scientists brought to the US under the Operation Paperclip program.
The author also interviewed dozens of interrogators and colleagues of the scientists that had access to German archives, dossiers discovered at Harvard University, and government archives.
In this definitive work, Jacobsen shines the light on one of the most controversial programs by the American government.
Annie Jacobsen’s “The Pentagon’s Brain” follows the history and development of one of the most secretive agencies named DARPA.
This stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is most famously known as being responsible for the development and conception of the Internet. DARPA is the same agency that has claimed responsibility for the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
But DARPA is not only involved in positive inventions but is also credited with the invention of drones both tiny and huge. Other inventions include the F117 steal fighter jet, sophisticated sensor technology, robotic soldiers, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the M16 Rifle, and Agent Orange.
DARPA has also invented a ton of other military weapons many of which remain top secret. One of the most well-known secret programs of DARPA was the predecessor to the NSA’s far-reaching data collection programs in “Total Information Awareness.”
The agency has also produced other less lethal advancements such as data compression, real-time video processing, image enhancement, and noise reduction.
This work is thus a full-length study into the workings of what has to be the most secretive of America’s military research agencies.
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