Catch-22 is my all time favorite book. So when I learned about The Bridgebusters, it immediately shot to the top of my “Want to Read” list. It has everything to make it a perfect read for me: airplanes, history and Heller. Then I found out about The True Story of Catch-22, written by the daughter of the real Colonel Cathcart, so I daisy-chained right into what turned out to be the Yin for Cleaver’s Yang.

The Bridgebusters is a history book of the 57th Bomb Wing in which Joseph Heller served as a bombardier on a B-25 during World War II. Cleaver details the missions primarily in the context of the Allied campaign to liberate Italy which, frankly, I am less familiar with than Operation Overlord and the action of the Eighth Air Force’s B-17s bombing Germany from England. Heller is shown as the cog he was in the U.S. fighting machine that defeated the Nazis and Cleaver puts forth an interesting theory of the author’s true relationship to Yossarian. ( )