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World War II

Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin

Thu, 02/21/2013 - 05:00 | Angela Critics
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Cover of Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon

Intrigue, spying, resistance fighters working behind enemy lines to sabotage the Nazis—Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World's Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin, has it all. The story is true, but it reads like a spy thriller.

Pearl Harbor: Day of Infamy

Mon, 12/03/2012 - 13:42 | Steve Johnson
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Pearl Harbor: Day of Infamy

At dawn on December 7, 1941, America was at peace, although it was clear a war was coming. Nazi Germany had overrun most of Europe and was literally at the gates of Moscow. Britain was slowly starving as Nazi submarines sank the ships carrying food and medicine the British needed. Although the United States sent huge amounts of war supplies to Britain and Russia and had greatly expanded its own Army and Navy, Americans were unwilling to go to war against enemies who had never attacked us.

A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France

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By Caroline Moorehead

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In January 1943, the Gestapo hunted down 230 women of the French Resistance and sent them to Auschwitz. This is their story, told in full for the first time--a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the power of friendship to transcend evil that is an essential addition to the history of World War II.

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Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of the Greatest All-girl Swing Band in the World

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By Marilyn Nelson

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In the 1940s, as the world was at war, a remarkable jazz band performed on the American home front. This all-female band, originating from a boarding school in the heart of Mississippi, found its way to the most famous ballrooms in the country, offering solace during the hard years of the war. They dared to be an interracial group despite the cruelties of Jim Crow laws, and they dared to assert their talents though they were women in a "man's" profession. Told in thought-provoking poems and arresting images, this unusual look at our nation's history is deep and inspiring.

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If you like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Fri, 12/09/2011 - 13:47 | Kara Rockwell
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Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

This readalike is in response to a patron's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier: Based on local history and family stories passed down by the author's great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded soldier Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada. Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to revive her father's farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman and Ada confront the vastly transformed world they've been delivered." (Book description)

If you like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, you might like these titles:

Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles
The Colleys are farmers in the Missouri Ozarks. Although Southerners, the family tries to remain neutral, a fact ignored by the Union militia who confiscate their livestock and arrest their daughter, Adair, on charges of "enemy collaboration." Yet as Adair soon discovers, fate can be a double-edged sword. (Catalog summary)
 


 

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
With ravishing beauty & unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room & whose memories of passion, betrayal, & rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening. (Catalog summary)

 

The Women Who Wrote the War

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By Nancy Caldwell Sorel

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Celebrates the accomplishments of World War II's female war correspondents, who risked their lives in combat zones to provide firsthand reports on the events of the war.

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Beatrice Schenk de Regniers Danced with Words and Pictures

Mon, 08/01/2011 - 12:26 | Virginia Johnson
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May I Bring a Friend by Beatrice de Regniers

"I think of writing--particularly of writing picture books--as a kind of choreography. A picture book must have pace and movement and pattern. Pictures and text should, together, create the pattern, rather than simply run parallel." --  Beatrice Schenk de Regniers*

Quick Facts:

Born:  in Lafayette, Indiana, on August 16, 1914
Favorite writing genres: picture books, folk tales, poetry, and plays
Well-known books: May I Bring a Friend?; What Can You Do with a Shoe?;  Everyone Is Good for Something;  David and Goliath;  It Does Not Say Meow, and Other Animal Rhymes;  Little Sister and the Month Brothers
Her last name is pronounced, “drain-yay”
Education: Attended University of Illinois, 1931-33; University of Chicago, Ph.B., 1935, graduate study, 1936-37; Winnetka Graduate Teachers College, M.Ed., 1941.
Career:  Member of the Eloise Moore Dance Group, Chicago, 1942-43; copywriter, Scott Foresman, publishers, Chicago, 1943-44; welfare officer, UNRRA, Egypt, 1944-46; copywriter, American Book Company, New York, 1948-49; director of educational materials, American Heart Association, New York, 1949-61; editor, Lucky Book Club, Scholastic Book Services, New York, 1961-81.
Awards:  May Children's Spring Book Festival honor book, New York Herald Tribune, 1958, for Cats Cats Cats Cats Cats;  Boys' Clubs Junior Book Award, 1960, for The Snow Party;  Indiana Authors Day Award, honorable mention, 1961, for The Shadow Book;  Caldecott Award, 1965, for May I Bring a Friend? ‘s illustrations by Beni Montresor; certificate of excellence, American Institute of Graphic Arts, for communicating with children;  Brooklyn Art Books for Children citation, 1973, for Red Riding Hood: Retold in Verse for Boys and Girls to Read Themselves.
Memberships: Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Dramatists Guild, PEN, Society of Children's Book Writers.
Died:  March 1, 2000, from a stroke at her home in Washington, D.C.

 

The English Patient

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By Michael Ondaatje

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With unsettling beauty and intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. (Catalog summary)
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I'm Staying with My Boys: The Heroic Life of Sgt. John Basilone, USMC

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By Jim Proser with Jerry Cutter

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A profile of the only World War II Marine to win the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and a Purple Heart parallels his career with notable World War II memoirists while tracing his significant achievements at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.
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The Few and the Proud: From the Sands of Iwo Jima to the Deserts of Iraq: Marine Corps Drill Instructors in Their Own Words

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By Larry Smith

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Beginning with interviews with the last surviving drill instructors of World War II, this oral history offers the voices of veterans from every major war of the last sixty years, concluding with accounts of what it takes to train marines for Iraq today. It contains revelatory details about the vicious training techniques used to prepare marines for the great battles against Japan in the Pacific; the Ribbon Creek training disaster of the 1950s; and legendary stories by the likes of Iwo Jima veteran "Iron" Mike Mervosh and R. Lee Ermey, the infamous drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket.

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