Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout
To be honest, I have a lot of books that get misplaced. I put them in safe places and well, they are so safe even I can’t find them. But there is always a way to find them. And with Song of a Blackbird by Maria van Lieshout that way was the library and interlibrary loan. A powerful and beautifully done story of family and the horrors of war unfolds across the pages. As it is told via a blackbird, things at times become almost […]
Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor by Steve Kemper
The attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking and unexpected to the American public and government, but for Joseph C Grew, the American ambassador to Japan, it was the only logical outcome to a decade’s worth of missed opportunities for peace. For all the many times we rehashed World War Two in school, I never learned much about what led Japan to side with the Axis, and why they seemingly so suddenly launched into war with the United States – Pearl Harbor always arrived as a […]
Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid
As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine. The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into […]
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Otto and Anna Quangel are indifferent toward living under Nazi rule, but when they receive the news that their son was killed in the war, they begin a silent campaign of defiance. There’s a phrase in the afterword that’s used to sum up the central theme of this book – ‘the banality of good.’ There’s plenty of well-known stories of resistance against oppressive powers from all eras – certainly plenty I can recount from World War Two alone, plenty of lives saved and a huge […]
Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham
A decade after World War 2, Rachel Perlman may have moved to New York City and gotten married, but she is still haunted by her experiences as a Jewish girl hiding in plain sight in Berlin and the death of her mother. Despite what the blurb led me to expect, this book is not a World War 2 novel – at least, not exactly. Though Rachel’s experiences in Berlin hang over the entirety of the story, we spend most our time with her grappling with […]
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
This one is so hard to talk about without spoilers! There were at least three big plot points that took me by surprise, so I don’t really want to tell you anything. But I enjoyed 99% of this book, and I’m pretty sure I recommend it, even with that 1%. To start with, Julie is a LADY SPY. She’s beyond great. Unfortunately, she’s been captured by the Nazis, and has been forced to write down secret codes. However, she keeps resisting in whatever small ways […]
