At one point in The Skies Belong to Us, Brendan Koerner’s riveting second book, a troubled Vietnam veteran informs his girlfriend that they will be hijacking a plane to North Vietnam before settling in Australia. “There was only one way she could possibly respond to such a deliciously extreme proposal,” writes Koerner: “'So, what do I wear to a hijacking?’”

Such incredible moments recur throughout the book, an account of a spate of plane hijackings that took place during the sixties and seventies. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of a 2008 non-fiction thriller about a