The bravery he showed after suffering near-fatal injuries in the final days of World War II is the stuff of legend. Now, for the first time in his own words, Dole tells the moving story of his harrowing experience on and off the battlefield, and how it changed his life.Speaking here not as a politician but as a wounded G. I., Dole recounts his own odyssey of courage and sacrifice, and also honors the fighting spirit of the countless heroes with whom he served. Heartfelt and inspiring, One Soldier's Story is the World War II chronicle that America has been waiting for.

    During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion -- which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany -- reveals Grass at his most intimate.

    In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city.In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it. Always on the run, never certain whom she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safe-houses, living with foreign workers, staunch communists, and even committed Nazis. Only her quick-witted determination and the most hair-raising strokes of luck allowed her to survive.

    Jewish historical fiction

    In 1942, however, after a series of defeats in the Pacific and the struggle to establish a beachhead on the European front, America seemed to be on the brink of defeat and was beginning to splinter from within.   Exploring this precarious moment, Tracy Campbell paints a portrait of the deep social, economic, and political fault lines that pitted factions of citizens against each other in the post–Pearl Harbor era, even as the nation mobilized, government-aided industrial infrastructure blossomed, and parents sent their sons off to war. This captivating look at how American society responded to the greatest stress experienced since the Civil War reveals the various ways, both good and bad, that the trauma of 1942 forced Americans to redefine their relationship with democracy in ways that continue to affect us today.

    The charismatic daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Kate Chase enjoyed unprecedented political power for a woman. As her widowed father’s hostess, she set up a rival “court” against Mary Lincoln in hopes of making her father president and herself his First Lady. To facilitate that goal, she married one of the richest men in the country, the handsome “boy governor” of Rhode Island, in the social event of the Civil War. She moved easily between the worlds of high fashion, adorning herself in the most regal Parisian gowns, and politics, managing her father's presidential campaigns. "No Queen has ever reigned under the Stars and Stripes," one newspaper would write, "but this remarkable woman came closer to being a Queen than any American woman has."But when William Sprague turned out to be less of a prince as a husband, Kate found comfort in the arms of a powerful married senator. The ensuing sex scandal ended her virtual royalty; after the marriage crumbled and the money disappeared, she was left only with her children and her ever-proud bearing. She became a social outcast and died in poverty, yet in her final years she would find both greater authenticity and the inner peace that had always eluded her.Kate Chase’s dramatic story is one of ambition and tragedy, set against the seductive allure of the Civil War and Gilded Age, involving some of the most famous personalities in American history. In this beautifully written and meticulously researched biography, drawing on much unpublished material, John Oller captures the extraordinary life of a woman who was a century ahead of her time.

     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.

    It was the same piece and the same pianist, when broadcasting was resumed six years later. The Pianist is Szpilman's account of the years inbetween, of the death and cruelty inflicted on the Jews of Warsaw and on Warsaw itself, related with a dispassionate restraint borne of shock. Szpilman, now 88, has not looked at his description since he wrote it in 1946 (the same time as Primo Levi's If This Is A Man?; it is too personally painful. The rest of us have no such excuse. Szpilman's family were deported to Treblinka, where they were exterminated; he survived only because a music-loving policeman recognised him. This was only the first in a series of fatefully lucky escapes that littered his life as he hid among the rubble and corpses of the Warsaw Ghetto, growing thinner and hungrier, yet condemned to live. Ironically it was a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved Szpilman's life by bringing food and an eiderdown to the derelict ruin where he discovered him. Hosenfeld died seven years later in a Stalingrad labour camp, but portions of his diary, reprinted here, tell of his outraged incomprehension of the madness and evil he witnessed, thereby establishing an effective counterpoint to ground the nightmarish vision of the pianist in a desperate reality. Szpilman originally published his account in Poland in 1946, but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin's Polish minions as it unashamedly described collaborations by Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Nazis. In 1997 it was published in Germany after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase. This admirably robust translation by Anthea Bell is the first in the English language. There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were 240,000. Wladyslaw Szpilman's extraordinary account of his own miraculous survival offers a voice across the years for the faceless millions who lost their lives. --David Vincent

    presidency—Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented third term, and talented Republican businessman Wendell Willkie—found themselves on the defensive against American isolationists and their charismatic spokesman Charles Lindbergh, who called for surrender to Hitler's demands. In this dramatic account of that turbulent and consequential election, historian Susan Dunn brings to life the debates, the high-powered players, and the dawning awareness of the Nazi threat as the presidential candidates engaged in their own battle for supremacy. 1940 not only explores the contest between FDR and Willkie but also examines the key preparations for war that went forward, even in the midst of that divisive election season. The book tells an inspiring story of the triumph of American democracy in a world reeling from fascist barbarism, and it offers a compelling alternative scenario to today’s hyperpartisan political arena, where common ground seems unattainable.

    Pieced together by the couple’s granddaughters, who combed through historical research, family lore, and insights from a neighbour’s wartime diary, the story chronicles how the couple struggled to keep their children from starving, but could not keep them from harm, and reveals the strife and hardship endured not just by them, but by a nation. These experiences, kept from subsequent generations of the family, were almost lost until, long after their deaths, the path of the couple through the war and on to Canada was uncovered. A personal and intimate account within the larger context of a terrorized nation, this is also a story of the bonds and strains among family, told with the haunting, evocative prose for which Kristen den Hartog is known.

    Violette Szabo was by all accounts extraordinarily beautiful, but also totally fearless and a dead shot. She became a member of the Special Operations Executive, Britain's premier sabotage and subversion organization of the time. On June 7, 1944 Violette Szabo left behind a two-year-old daughter to parachute into France on a special mission for SOE.Szabo and other British agents were assigned to organize French resistance fighters to hinder the advance of the SS Das Reich Division to the Normandy beaches. Unfortunately, Szabo's party was soon ambushed by the SS.Unable to walk due to a twisted ankle, Szabo covered the retreat of her comrades with machine-gun fire. Captured, she went through a series of interrogations and changes of confinement before ending up at Ravensbr�ck, the German all-women's concentration camp. She was finally executed on January 26, 1945. She was 23 years old. This exceptional work has been written with the assistance of Violette Szabo's daughter Tanya, and unravels fact and fiction about one of the most fascinating characters of World War II.

    Late one night while her family slept, Neumark discovered her hidden Jewish heritage—and uncovered hundreds of questions: Did her grandfather really die in a concentration camp? How did she never know her grandmother was a death-camp survivor? Why had the family history and faith been rejected and hidden? Heidi’s search for the truth quickly became more than a personal journey; it also became spiritual. It caused profound ponderings on her thirty-year vocation as a Lutheran pastor. It was a shocking revelation that her Jewish roots and successive family loss and trauma now suddenly and inherently connected her to the multi-ethnic, marginalized community she had been ministering to for three decades. Hidden Inheritance takes the reader on a journey that seamlessly weaves personal narrative, social history, and biblical reflection to challenge readers to explore their own identity, vocation, and theology. Neumark boldly calls readers to explore the harsh places of the past, uncover the possible buried secrets, ask new questions, forge new understanding, and discover new hope for transformation that is only possible when what has been hidden is finally brought to light.

    Recently, hundreds of those books were discovered in the Library of Congress by Timothy Ryback, complete with Hitler’s marginalia on their pages—underlines, question marks, exclamation points, scrawled comments. Ryback traces the path of the key phrases and ideas that Hitler incorporated into his writing, speeches, conversations, self-definition, and actions.We watch him embrace Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the works of Shakespeare. We see how an obscure treatise inspired his political career and a particular interpretation of Ibsen’s epic poem Peer Gynt helped mold his ruthless ambition. He admires Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, and declares it required reading for fellow party members. We learn how his extensive readings on religion and the occult provide the blueprint for his notion of divine providence, how the words of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are reborn as infamous Nazi catchphrases, and, finally, how a biography of Frederick the Great fired the destructive fanaticism that compelled Hitler to continue fighting World War II when all hope of victory was lost.Hitler’s Private Library, a landmark in the study of the Third Reich, offers a remarkable view into Hitler’s intellectual world and personal evolution. It demonstrates the ability of books to preserve in vivid ways the lives of their collectors, underscoring the importance of the tactile in the era of the digital.

    Not knowing what to do with the interviews, he boxed & stored them. After his death, his son Stephan--also a journalist--inherited the files. Fascinated by what he found, he set out to re-interview the same people 40 years later. Revisiting his father's subjects, Lebert explores how each of them deals with the agonizing question: What does it mean to have a father who participated in mass murder? For the most part, the Leberts found that the children remained intensely loyal to their fathers, regardless of their crimes. Gudrun Himmler, for example, lives in a Munich suburb under her husband's name, keeping secret contact with other nostalgic Nazis. In fact, Niklas Frank is the only one who rejects his heritage. But when he writes in a popular German magazine of his rage against his father--charged with 2,000,000 deaths--hundreds of letters pour in from outraged readers. Whatever your father did, fathers must always be honored. Remarkable in both its content & its narrative power, "My Father's Keeper" is an illuminating addition to the dark literature of the Nazi past & of how the past haunts the present.For You Bear My Name --The 1959 Manuscript: Wolf-Rudiger Hess --Who Were the Fathers? --The 1959 Manuscript: Wolf-Rudiger Hess and the Nazi Women --On a Home Page the Story Continues --The 1959 Manuscript: Martin Bormann Junior --A Priest Offers a Warning about the Future --The 1959 Manuscript: Niklas and Norman Frank --A Man Wants to Destroy His Father --The 1959 Manuscript: Gudrun Himmler --An Embittered Daughter and the Not-Wanting-to-See Principle --The 1959 Manuscript: Edda Goring --A Sightseeing Tour of Munich in the Year 2000 --The 1959 Manuscript: The von Schirach Brothers --A Final Meeting with the Lawyer