In the Kingdom of Ice (Sides)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Memphis, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—PEN USA Award
• Currently—lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico


Hampton Sides is an American historian and journalist—author of several bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction.

In addition to being a book author, 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.

Sides has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as American Experience, the Today show, Book TV, History Channel, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Colbert Report, and Imus in the Morning.

Books
His Ghost Soldiers (2001), a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and been translated into a dozen foreign languages. 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. 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 (2006) focuses on controversial frontiersman Kit Carson and his role in the conquest of the American West. It was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and selected as that year's best history title by the History Book Club and the Western Writers of America. The book 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 (2010) is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history to capture James Earl Ray. Ray pled guilty in 1969 and served the rest of his life in prison. Sides, a native of Memphis, is the first historian to make use of a new digital archive in that city (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 episode "Roads to Memphis", which originally aired May 3, 2010, on American Experience.

Personal
A native of Memphis with a BA in history from Yale, 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. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/3/2014.)