Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II

By Thomas Childers


Intimate portraits of three families whose lives were adversely affected by World War II challenges popular misconceptions that the war's soldiers returned healthy and convinced that their service was in the world's best interest, in a revisionist account that reveals how veterans struggled with such debilitating challenges as PTSD, substance abuse, unemployment, and homelessness.

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Shadows In The Jungle: The Alamo Scouts Behind Japanese Lines in World War II

By Larry Alexander


Drawing on personal interviews with and recollections by veterans, the author of Biggest Brother chronicles the exploits of the Alamo Scouts, members of an elite Army reconnaissance unit during World War II, a group that spent weeks behind enemy lines to gather much needed intelligence for Allied forces in the Pacific.

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Flight from the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946

By Deborah Dwork & Robert Jan Van Pelt

Most Holocaust studies understandably focus on the plight of the victims in death camps and those who suffered the outrages committed by special SS units as the Wehrmacht rampaged across Eastern Europe. Here, the authors shed light on Jews who attempted to escape the fate that their tormentors planned. Beginning with the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, many German Jews saw the writing on the wall. Their emigration was surprisingly orderly, and was facilitated by "cooperative" German officials. The fortunate ones found refuge in Britain, the U.S., and Palestine. Others, like the family of Anne Frank, fled to soon-to-be occupied nations, including the Netherlands and France. As Dwork and van Pelt chillingly recount, orderly emigration soon gave way to panicky flight as Nazi persecution increased and windows closed in various nations that had seemed receptive. There are heroes here, including Gentiles who sheltered and smuggled Jews, and villains who knowingly denied Jews a safe haven and condemned them to certain extinction. This is an excellent examination of a rarely emphasized aspect of the Holocaust.
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Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler

By Anne Nelson

Hitler and the Nazi Party never achieved total political and social control over Germany. Even after the onset of World War II, a few brave voices continued clandestine but active opposition. The best known were the group of military and religious figures led by Klaus von Stauffenburg and the White Rose organization centered around university students and siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. Nelson, a playwright and foreign correspondent, has examined the personalities and activities of another tiny and courageous group. Dubbed the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo and led by young Germans and German American members, the group was remarkably successful at serving in government positions while gathering intelligence, disseminating anti-Nazi information, and saving the lives of Jews. Nelson effectively conveys the sense of determination and tension that characterized members, particularly as the Gestapo closed in on them. A large percentage of the group was captured and executed. Nelson plays down the pro-Soviet views of many members, but this is still a worthy tribute to their courage and dedication.
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The Lions of Iwo Jima

By Major General Fred Haynes and James A. Warren

Combat Team 28, one of the greatest units fielded in the history of the U.S. Marines, landed on the black sands of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945. The unit, 4,500 men strong, plunged immediately into ferocious combat, and by the time the battled ended, 70 percent of the men in the team’s three assault battalions were killed or seriously wounded. The stories told here, many for the first time, will seem too cruel, too heartbreaking to be believed. As one veteran remarked, “Each day we learned a new way to die.” Major General Fred Haynes, then a young captain, is the last surviving office in CT 28 who was intimately involved in planning and coordinating all phases of the team’s fight on Iwo Jima. In this astonishing narrative, Haynes and James A. Warren recapture in riveting detail what the Marines experienced, drawing on a wealth of previously untapped documents, personal narratives, letters, and interviews with survivors to offer fresh interpretations of the fight for Suribachi, the iconic flag-raising photograph, and the nature of the campaign as a whole.
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Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty-Two Days That Decided World War II

By David Downing


As the Japanese fleet prepared to sail from Japan to Pearl Harbor, the German army was launching its final desperate assault on Moscow, while the British were planning a decisive blow against Rommel in North Africa. The British conquered the desert, the Germans succumbed to Moscow’s winter, and the Japanese awakened the sleeping giant of American might. In just three weeks, from November 17 to December 8, the course of World War II was decided and the fate of Germany and Japan was sealed.

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A safe haven : Harry S. Truman and the founding of Israel

by Allis Radosh. The alliance between the U.S. and Israel, which now appears indivisible, is actually of fairly recent vintage. In fact, American support for the partition of Palestine and the recognition of an independent Jewish state in 1948 was no sure thing. It happened primarily due to the sympathy and decision of President Truman. While he had Jewish friends, Truman was not free of common American prejudices concerning Jews. He had no particular emotional commitment to the Zionist goal of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, and he often bristled at the relentless stridency of Zionist lobbying. The authors illustrate the equally intense pressures applied upon Truman by State Department professionals, most of whom were sympathetic to Arab goals in Palestine. In most cases, Truman leaned heavily upon the advice of the secretary of state regarding foreign policy, and George Marshall was intensely opposed to partition. The authors assert that Truman was moved by his awareness of Jewish suffering and the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jews still languishing in DP camps. This is an excellent examination of a presidential decision that has had immense historical consequences. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Mission, Black List #1: The Inside Story of the Search for Saddam Hussein - As Told by the Soldier Who Masterminded His Capture

By Eric Maddox with Davin Seay

A behind-the-scenes chronicle of the search for Saddam Hussein offers a moment-by-moment narrative account that also profiles the author's non-violent, psychological interrogation method.

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To the End of the Earth: Our Epic Journey to the North Pole and the Legend of Peary and Henson

By Tom Avery

April 2009 is the one-hundredth anniversary of perhaps the greatest controversy in the history of exploration. Did U.S. Naval Commander Robert Peary and his team dogsled to the North Pole in thirty-seven days in 1909? Or, as has been challenged, was this speed impossible, and was he a cheat? In 2005, polar explorer Tom Avery and his team set out to recreate this 100-year-old journey, using the same equipment as Peary, to prove that Peary had indeed done what he had claimed and discovered the North Pole. Navigating treacherous pressure ridges, deadly channels of open water, bitterly cold temperatures, and traveling in a similar style to Peary’s with dog teams and replica wooden sledges bound together with cord, Avery tells the story of how his team covered 413 nautical miles to the North Pole in thirty-six days and twenty-two hours—some four hours faster than Peary. Weaving fascinating polar exploration history with thrilling extreme adventure, this is Avery’s story of how he and his team nearly gave their lives proving Peary told the truth.
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The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland

By Kristen den Hartog & Tracy Kasaboski

The Occupied Garden is the powerful true story of a market gardener and his fiercely devout wife who were living a simple life in Holland when the Nazis invaded in 1940. During the subsequent occupation, Gerrit and Cor den Hartog struggled to keep their young family from starving and from being broken up in an era of intimidation, disappearances, and bombings -- until one devastating day when they found they were unable to protect their children from the war.

It wasn’t until long after Gerrit and Cor’s deaths that their granddaughters began to piece their story together; combing through Dutch archives, family lore, and a neighbor’s wartime diary, den Hartog and Kasaboski have lovingly and seamlessly recreated their grandparents’ wartime years. The result is an extraordinary tale of strife and hardship that contains moments of breathtaking courage -- a young mother’s bicycle journey of two hundred miles to find food for her children, a brother and sister’s desperate escape into unoccupied France, a pastor forced into hiding for encouraging acts of resistance -- with a cast of characters that includes the exiled Dutch royal family, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. But it is Gerrit and Cor who take center stage in what is ultimately a deeply moving love story of a man and woman who drew strength from each other throughout those difficult years.

Poignant and unforgettable, The Occupied Garden is a testament to the resiliency of ordinary people living in an extraordinary time, written by two sisters determined to keep their family history alive.

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