Book picks similar to
Small Town, Big Oil: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the Richest Man in the World—And Won by David W. Moore
non-fiction
history
nonfiction
20th-century
A House For Spies: SIS Operations into Occupied France from a Sussex Farmhouse
Edward Wake-Walker - 2011
From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house. But who were these men and women that passed through the Bertram’s house? And what activities did they conduct whilst in France that meant that so many of them never returned? Edward Wake-Walker charts the experiences of numerous agents, such as Gilbert Renault, Christian Pineau and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and the networks of operatives that they created that provided top-secret intelligence on German defences and naval bases, U-boats, as well as Hitler’s devastating new weapons, the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs. A House For Spies provides fascinating insight into the lives of SIS agents and their Lysander pilots who provided invaluable intelligence to Allied forces. This is a much-forgotten aspect of the Second World War that is only now being told by Edward Wake-Walker. “Utterly fascinating, very moving and funny. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.” — Hugh Grant “Edward Wake-Walker's meticulously researched chronicles of desperate resistance, audacity, duty, determination and daring are a valuable addition to the history of World War II” — Bel Mooney, Daily Mail “It kept me up at night as I wanted to know what happened to all the various characters [brought] so admirably back to life” — Russell England, Director of Bletchley Park: Codebreaking's Forgotten Genius and Operation Mincemeat
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 2016
What ensued was a media firestorm and a whodunit that transfixed the nation, providing daily debates—and cruel, dinner table entertainment. Now, forty years after Michael Skakel’s conviction, his cousin, acclaimed activist and writer Robert Kennedy, Jr., has taken matters into his own hands to get the charges dropped and clear his cousin’s name.This startling expose—a page-turning, true story of murder, romance, and fame—is the story of Skakel’s conviction that the public has never before been prevue to. It is the product of hundreds of interviews with Skakel and those who knew him, Martha Moxley, and what may have happened the night of the crime, Halloween eve. It also explores why Kennedy believes Skakel has yet to receive a fair trial, and why he demands the original verdict be overturned.This is a heart-wrenching story with a powerful cast of characters. It opens the doors for the public into what was once a “perfect” Greenwich community and how a crime shook an elite family. Kennedy presents the evidence through enlightening text, photographs, and new interviews, and allows readers to decide, given the facts, what they believe really happened to Martha and if, forty years after his crucifixion, Michael Skakel should finally walk free.
No Surrender: A World War II Memoir
James J. Sheeran - 2010
A paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, James Sheeran was just a kid when he floated into Normandy on D-Day-only to be captured soon afterward by the Germans. Escaping from a POW train bound for Germany, Sheeran traveled behind enemy lines in France, eventually fighting alongside the French Resistance. After hooking up with Patton's advancing army, he fought admirably in Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, and was ultimately awarded the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and the Chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor. Sheeran's breathtaking chronicle of his capture, daring escape, fierce guerilla resistance, and valor under fire is an unforgettable testament to the spirit of the American soldier.
Call Them by Their True Names
Rebecca Solnit - 2018
Called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between.In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, “with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later.” To get to the root of these American crises, she contends that “to acknowledge this state of war is to admit the need for peace,” countering the despair of our age with a dose of solidarity, creativity, and hope.The loneliness of Donald Trump --Coda (July 16, 2018) --Milestones in misogyny --Twenty million missing storytellers --Ideology of isolation --Naïve cynicism --Facing the furies --Preaching to the choir --Climate change is violence --Blood on the foundation --Death by gentrification: the killing of Alex Nieto and the savaging of San Francisco --No way in, no way out --Bird in a cage: visiting Jarvis Masters on death row --Coda: case dismissed --The monument wars --Eight million ways to belong --The light from Standing Rock --Break the story --Hope in grief --In praise of indirect consequences
Scattered Rays of Light: The Incredible Survival Story of The Kotowski Family During WW2 (Holocaust Survivor Memoir, World War II Book 1)
Dovit Yehudit Yalovizky - 2020
Immediate danger of destruction. Tiny rays of hope.Yaakov was the youngest son of the Kotowskis, a well-to-do Jewish family in the small Polish town of Skulsk, who enjoyed the respect and admiration of local Jews and Christians alike.The quiet life of the family was disrupted abruptly when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.Soon, its members were deported to a faraway village where they suffered horrific torments at the hands of the Germans and their collaborators.The head of the family, who was blessed with sharp instincts, grasped what was about to take place and instructed his children to disperse in different directions, in the hope that at least some of them would be able to survive.This is the fascinating story of the Kotowski family, who was thrown deep into the flames that lit the fire that exterminated six million Jews, and yet, over half of the ten-member family managed to flee the blazing inferno against all odds.
Jumping Over Shadows: A Memoir
Annette Gendler - 2017
Her Great-Aunt Resi had been married to a Jew in Czechoslovakia before World War II--a marriage that, while happy, created tremendous difficulties for the extended family once the Nazis took over their hometown in 1938, and ultimately did not survive the pressures of the time. Annette and Harry's love, meanwhile, was the ultimate nightmare for Harry's family of Holocaust survivors. Weighed down by the burdens of their family histories, Annette and Harry kept their relationship secret for three years, until they could forge a path into the future and create a new life in Chicago. As time went on, however, Annette found a spiritual home in Judaism--a choice that paved the way toward acceptance by Harry's family, and redemption for some of the wounds of her own family's past.
Kidnapped and Sold By Indians -- True Story of a 7-Year-Old Settler Child (Annotated) (First-Hand Account Of Being Kidnapped By Indians)
Matthew Brayton - 2010
Still, this first-hand account does shed much light on what it was really like to come under the charge of many different Indian tribes.Although Brayton’s treatment was not entirely negative or positive, his frank and blunt story does much to dispel the romantic stories that have been perpetuated about young settlers’ children who became Indian chattel. It does much to tell true history and dispel any deliberate or accidental revisions. In many cases the Indians treated Brayton well, but there can be no doubt that they stole from him and his family a life that would end up confused and stuck between two worlds. Although Brayton did finally unite with many of his natural family, he never stopped identifying with Native Americans, and he was forced to leave an Indian wife and child behind. In fact, when the War of Rebellion or Civil War broke out, Brayton enlisted and served in an American Indian brigade. Chet DembeckPublisher of One
Agent High Pockets
Claire Phillips - 2014
Second, she is “High-Pockets,” the outstanding and resourceful spy operating in Jap-held Manila for over 2 years. Third, she is a guerrilla officer; determined and able leader and organizer of the Manila underground. Last, she is ‘Comadre,’ the intensely patriotic, and spiritually strong godmother of ragged, desperate men.” Major John Peyton Boone Agent High Pockets is the remarkable story of a fascinating woman who under the pressures of war found any resourceful means to aid her friends against their common enemy, the Japanese, through the tumultuous years of World War Two. This memoir, written by Claire Phillips, shortly after World War Two provides brilliant detail into her life as she spied, smuggled information, and funneled aid to American guerilla fighters who were hidden in the jungles surrounding Manila. Shortly after arriving in the Philippines she fell in love with Sgt. John V. Phillips and became engaged to marry him. But before the ceremony could take place the Japanese Imperial Army invaded, forcing Phillips and her fiancé to retreat to the Bataan peninsula and conduct a quick ceremony in the jungle. Claire’s resourcefulness allowed her survive through these turbulent years and she opened a nightclub, Club Tsubaki, on the Manila waterfront. The Japanese officers who frequented it had little knowledge that they were paying for the contraband that Claire and her friends were smuggling to POW camps and their loud, drunken conversations were being quickly relayed to American guerillas in the surrounding jungles. She could not evade Japanese authorities forever, however, and in May 1944 she was arrested. While at the notorious Bilibid Prison she endured numerous forms of torture but refused to give any information away. This remarkable account should be essential reading for anyone interested in the war in the Pacific and how civilians who had been caught up in the conflict fought to survive and support their country. Claire was later given the Medal of Freedom for her activities through the course of the war. Her citation reads: “By direction of the President, under the provisions of Army Regulations 600-45, the Medal of Honor is awarded to you by the Commander-in-Chief, Far East, for the meritorious service which has aided the United States in the prosecution of the war against Japan in the Southwest Pacific Areas, from June 1942 to June 1944.” After she returned to the United States she wrote her account of this time which was published as Manila Espionage in 1947. Her book was the basis of a Hollywood feature film, I Was an American Spy, released in 1951 and starring Anne Dvorak as Phillips. She died of meningitis in 1960.
Detroit: An American Autopsy
Charlie LeDuff - 2013
Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots. In another life, Charlie LeDuff won the Pulitzer Prize reporting for The New York Times. But all that is behind him now, after returning to find his hometown in total freefall. Detroit is where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed; where his sister lost herself to drugs; where his brother works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “Made in America.” With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark—and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses—LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its neighborhood against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption. He investigates state senators and career police officials, following the money to discover who benefits from Detroit’s decline. He befriends union organizers, homeless do-gooders, embattled businessmen, and struggling homeowners, all ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Americans have hoped for decades that Detroit was an exception, an outlier. What LeDuff reveals is that Detroit is, once and for all, America’s city: It led us on the way up, and now it is leading us on the way down. Detroit can no longer be ignored because what happened there is happening out here. Redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, but Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. Instead, LeDuff shares a deeply human drama of colossal greed, ignorance, endurance, and courage. Detroit is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer—and a black comic tale of the absurdity of American life in the twenty-first century.
The Pretty Girl Killer
Andrew Byrne - 2019
Wilder was handsome and charming, and time and time again he managed to convince beautiful young women that he was a fashion photographer looking to help them start a career in modelling. What followed were some of the most brutal, sadistic crimes the world has ever seen – as well as a years-long police operation, dogged by missed opportunities and bad decisions, to track the killer down. Featuring new evidence unearthed from case files and interviews with FBI agents, witnesses and survivors, some of whom have spoken for the first time since the horrendous crimes were committed, The Pretty Girl Killer takes us right into the mind and moment of one of Australia’s most heinous exports.
Lindbergh: The Crime
Noel Behn - 1994
On the night of March 1, 1932, celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. The family paid $50,000 to get “Little Lindy” back, but his remains were discovered in a grove of trees four miles from the Lindbergh house. More than two years after the abduction, Bruno Hauptmann, an unemployed carpenter and illegal German immigrant, was caught with $20,000 of the ransom money. He was arrested, tried, and executed for the crime. But did he really do it? New York Times–bestselling author Noel Behn spent eight years investigating the case, revisiting old evidence, discovering new information, and shining a bright light on the controversial actions of public figures such as New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, New Jersey State Police Superintendent H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Charles Lindbergh himself. The result is a fascinating and convincing new theory of the crime that exonerates Hauptmann and names a killer far closer to the Lindbergh family. A finalist for the Edgar Award, Lindbergh “not only provides answers to the riddles of the ‘Crime of the Century,’ but hurls us into time past, to a special moment in American history” (Peter Maas, New York Times–bestselling author of Underboss).
Trump's War: His Battle for America
Michael Savage - 2017
The man many consider to be the determining factor in driving Trump over the finish line by motivating millions of undecideds and the "Deplorables," who would have otherwise sat out the election, provides a crucial first look at the early direction of the Trump presidency. Savage has waged a twenty-five year war on the radio to save America's borders, language and culture from a progressive onslaught that is already turning Europe into a socialist, multiculturalist nightmare, where violent gangs of radical Islamic refugees terrorize defenseless citizens on a daily basis. While most in the chattering classes around the world dismissed Trump's campaign, conservative radio icon Dr. Michael Savage championed Trump's platform and helped him galvanize the support of disaffected middle Americans left behind by the globalist central planners in their distant capitol. Savage's army of listeners on The Savage Nation was instrumental in electing Donald Trump to take the fight to Washington. But electoral victory was only the beginning. Trump now has an even bigger challenge in delivering on the promises he made to millions of American voters. He faces relentless opposition from special interests in both parties who stand to lose trillions if Trump's America First policies become the law of the land.Dr. Michael Savage has been on the front line of this fight for decades and knows what Trump and his administration are up against. He lays out a path to victory for the new, conservative American revolutionaries in Trump's War. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Arial; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none}
Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
Rebecca Frankel - 2021
They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life.From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.
The President Will See You Now: My Stories and Lessons from Ronald Reagan's Final Years
Peggy Grande - 2017
. . Among the most unique and touching [books] ever done on the man . . . Wonderful." -- The AmericanSpectator In The President Will See You Now, devoted Reagan insider Peggy Grande shares behind-the-scenes stories, intimate moments, and insights into one of America's most beloved presidents. Grande, who started in the Office of Ronald Reagan as a college student and earned her way into a coveted role as the president's Executive Assistant, offers an unparalleled perspective on the post-presidency of a political icon. Grande's stories and never-before-seen photos show a unique, private side to a public figure and leader who reshaped conservatism, ushered in an era of prosperity, and helped spur the end of the Cold War. Grande reveals what day-to-day life was like in Reagan's California office, including the former president's relationship with the First Lady and his interactions with friends, world leaders, and everyday Americans. Grande recalls how Reagan kept a vigorous schedule for years after he left the White House, his robust engagement with others, and ongoing political advocacy. Despite his eventual Alzheimer's diagnosis, Grande shows how Ronald Reagan remained true to core beliefs, his gentlemanly kindness, and his undying hope for his country. Today the Reagan legacy looms over American politics more than ever. Grande reminds readers why: When Ronald Reagan was president, we not only loved ourselves but also loved America, and the American values he represented: faith, optimism, and patriotism.
The Underground Girls of Kabul: in Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan
Jenny Nordberg - 2014
A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as "dressed up like a boy") is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom. The Underground Girls of Kabul is anchored by vivid characters who bring this remarkable story to life: Azita, a female parliamentarian who sees no other choice but to turn her fourth daughter Mehran into a boy; Zahra, the tomboy teenager who struggles with puberty and refuses her parents' attempts to turn her back into a girl; Shukria, now a married mother of three after living for twenty years as a man; and Nader, who prays with Shahed, the undercover female police officer, as they both remain in male disguise as adults. At the heart of this emotional narrative is a new perspective on the extreme sacrifices of Afghan women and girls against the violent backdrop of America's longest war. Divided into four parts, the book follows those born as the unwanted sex in Afghanistan, but who live as the socially favored gender through childhood and puberty, only to later be forced into marriage and childbirth. The Underground Girls of Kabul charts their dramatic life cycles, while examining our own history and the parallels to subversive actions of people who live under oppression everywhere.