Three Stars Who doesn’t want to start the year with a book about pre-WW II Nazi Germany? I mean, what better way to ease into an attempted double cannonball? Despite the subject matter, this book is not a challenging read. I read Mr. Larson’s book about the Chicago World’s Fair (Devil in the White City) either last year or the year before and found it to be good but tough to get through. This book flowed better, although it didn’t really end. I mean, obviously, it […]
Book Two of the Century Trilogy
Book Two of the Century Trilogy takes us through the time between the World Wars and all the way through World War II. Lady Maud Fitzherbert is married to a German, and struggling in Germany with her family – trying to survive and fight the Nazis at the same time. The American Dewars end up fighting in different theaters (one Pacific, one European). The Russian Peshkovs (well, the one that stayed behind) are part of the Communist regime. This book features most of the main […]
Little Known Story of Italian-Jewish Resistance in WWII
This amazing novel tells the story of ordinary men and women—farmers, soldiers, priests and nuns, housewives, doctors, stonemasons—who took a stance against the Nazi juggernaut in Italy and waged a near hopeless war of resistance not only in defense of their homeland but in defense of Jews from throughout Europe who had fled across the Alps into an Italy which had broken with Germany, thinking to find a refuge from the genocide, only to discover that the Germans were occupying Italy and prepared to escalate […]
A Serial Killer Haunts Post-WWII Italy
Bojhalian takes us on a visit to Italy’s beautiful Tuscany during one of the most horrifying periods in that country’s history, when the German occupation had splintered the nation between the resistance, the collaborators, and the majority caught in between who mostly struggled to survive without selling their souls to the devil. But beyond a thought-provoking examination of choices and consequences under wartime conditions, Bojhalian also throws us into the middle of a hunt for a serial killer 10 years after the war’s end, a […]
A Time Traveler’s Homage to Jerome K. Jerome
If you are a fan of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) or PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, this novel is sure to please. Willis is a well known and “decorated” sci-fi author, having won multiple Nebula and Hugo Awards. She discovered JKJ through reading Robert Heinlein and gives him a tip of the hat in an amusing, clever and thoughtful work that combines time travel, mystery, and comedy of manners. It’s 2057 London and Ned Henry, an […]
The More Things Change …
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1994, this history of the Roosevelts and the home front from 1939 until FDR’s death in 1945 is a meticulously researched and engaging look at both the inner workings of the White House and the changing landscape of the US economy and society during World War II. Both the Roosevelts and the American public showed themselves to be extraordinarily brilliant and sometimes terribly flawed at a critical moment in world history. Goodwin did extensive research on her […]