Book picks similar to
Not Home for Christmas: A Day in the Life of the Mighty Eighth by John Meurs
biography
christmas
european-history
genealogy
Finding a Family at Christmas
Emma Ashwood - 2019
Rose couldn’t wait to meet her husband, only she didn’t realize that he had never wanted a wife. Tired of playing servant to her father, Rose Johnson decides to become a bride. She had been corresponding with William Dunn for the past six months and couldn’t wait to join him in Hope Creek to become his wife and mother to his twins. When she steps off the train in the strange frontier town, Rose realizes William Dunn isn’t who he proclaimed himself to be. Arriving on William’s ranch, Rose realizes the lies have been far flung. In a hopeless situation, the only light in Rose’s life is the twins. She soon falls in love with them, knowing that she couldn’t leave no matter what the circumstances. When she happens upon an injured man late one winter’s night, her instinct is to cry out for help. But something in the stranger’s eyes settled her and she takes to caring for him in his time of need instead. Only a week before Christmas, Rose doesn’t have the heart to turn him out in the cold. Besides, time with him warms her heart. Who is the stranger in the barn? Which way will Rose turn? Does she follow her heart? Can she leave the children she has grown to love? Will Christmas become a magical moment for Rose?
Piece By Piece a Genealogical Jigsaw
Irene Lewis Ward - 2015
Piece by piece, like a giant Victorian jigsaw, the evidence forms a fascinating picture, but one with a hole at its heart – a hole that will not be filled until the baffling mystery is solved.. Do they ever solve it and complete the picture? After ten years research in North Wales, a new piece of evidence and a distant memory cause a sudden change in venue which reveals the reason for the conspiracy of silence and the staggering truth about his mother.
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson - 2011
Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.
Killing the SS: The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History
Bill O'Reilly - 2018
A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among those war criminals were Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who performed hideous medical experiments at Auschwitz; Martin Bormann, Hitler's brutal personal secretary; Klaus Barbie, the cruel "Butcher of Lyon"; and perhaps the most awful Nazi of all: Adolf Eichmann.Killing the SS is the epic saga of the espionage and daring waged by self-styled "Nazi hunters." This determined and disparate group included a French husband and wife team, an American lawyer who served in the army on D-Day, a German prosecutor who had signed an oath to the Nazi Party, Israeli Mossad agents, and a death camp survivor. Over decades, these men and women scoured the world, tracking down the SS fugitives and bringing them to justice, which often meant death.Written in the fast-paced style of the Killing series, Killing the SS will educate and stun the reader.The final chapter is truly shocking.
Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany
Marie Jalowicz Simon - 2014
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.
First to Jump: How the Band of Brothers was Aided by the Brave Paratroopers of Pathfinders Com pany
Jerome Preisler - 2014
Army Pathfinders. The vanguard of the Allied forces in World War II Europe. Countless times they preceded invasions and battles vital to bringing the enemy to its knees.Because before the front lines could move forward, the Pathfinders had to move behind enemy lines . . .The first into combat, and the last out, their advance jumps into enemy territory were considered suicide missions by those who sent them into action. World War Two’s special operations commandos, they relied on their stealth, expert prowess, and matchless courage and audacity to set the stage for airborne drops and glider landings throughout Europe.They were born of hard necessity. After the invasion of Sicily almost ended in disaster, General Jim Gavin was determined to form an all-new unit of specialized soldiers who would jump ahead of the airborne forces—including the now legendary Easy Company—without any additional support, stealing across enemy terrain to scout and mark out drop zones with a unique array of homing equipment.Sporting Mohawk haircuts, war paint, and an attitude of brash confidence, they were the best of the best. Their heroic feats behind the lines were critical to nearly all of the Allies’ major victories from Normandy to snowy Bastogne—where they saved the day for thousands of besieged American troops in an operation almost forgotten by history—to the attack on the Ruhr River in Germany.This is the story of the U.S. Army Pathfinders—their training, bonding, and battlefield exploits—told from the perspectives of the daring men who jumped and the equally bold transport crews who risked everything to fly them into action.INCLUDES PHOTOS
The Forgotten Prince William: The House of Windsor's First Modern Prince
Parker Healy - 2012
A young page in Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding, in thirty short years William became the House of Windsor's first modern prince but has been largely forgotten. He tested the limits of royal convention in work and love by pursuing a career in business and diplomacy and dating women who could never be accepted as a royal bride. William also lived an adventurous life, escaping several near death experiences during travels around the world, witnessing one of the most tragic periods in American history, and becoming a competitive pilot before his life was cut short in a tragic accident.Based on personal accounts by the family and friends who knew William best, extracts from his own reflections on his life and family, and photographs at different stages of his life, this book provides a unique glimpse into a prince’s coming of age and what growing up in the British royal family is really like.
Living Our Best Lives: Cannon Hall Farm
The Nicholson Family - 2021
Mussolini: History in an Hour
Rupert Colley - 2014
Famed for his dictatorial style, his political cunning and admired – initially – by Hitler, Mussolini led the National Fascist Party and ruled Italy as Prime Minister from 1922 until his ousting in 1943. In so doing, he paved the way towards Italy’s defeat in World War Two, and some of the 20th century’s most destructive ideologies and practices.Following expulsion from Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini denounced all efforts of class conflict, and instead later commanded a Fascist March on Rome to become the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history. Thereafter he set about dismantling the apparatus of democracy and initiated what would become known as the one-party totalitarian state. With World War II came defeat, humiliation and his bloody deposing. Explaining his ideologies, policies, actions and flaws, ‘Mussolini: History in an Hour’ is the concise life of the man whose ideas helped create some of the worst horrors of the modern history.Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour…
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
Norman Ohler - 2015
There have been other books on Dr Morell's cocktail of treatments for Hitler and Goering's reliance on drugs, but Ohler's book is the first to show how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940. Ohler is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants. This chemical euphoria changes how we should think about the Nazi high command and its ability to understand the situation it found itself in by 1944-45. As such Blitzed will force a wider reinterpretation of several key events during the Second World War.
Christmas at Devil's Gate
Fenella J. Miller - 2017
Major, Lord Ralph Duval, is recuperating from a sabre wound that almost killed him.When her carriage breaks an axle in the snow, she is obliged to take refuge at the house she believes is called Devil's Gate. Will Ralph be able to keep her safe, or is he the biggest danger to her?
The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe
Stephen Harding - 2013
Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Germans. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue fourteen prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps. It’s a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.Based on personal memoirs, author interviews, and official American, German, and French histories, The Last Battle is the nearly unbelievable story of the most improbable battle of World War II — a tale of unlikely allies, bravery, cowardice, and desperate combat between implacable enemies.
Black Camp 21
Bill Jones - 2018
Every day, thousands more pour in on ships from France. But only the most dangerous are sent to Camp 21 - 'black' prisoners - SS diehards who've sworn death before surrender. Nothing will stop their war, unless it's a bullet.As one fanatic plots a mass breakout and glorious march on London, Max Hartmann dreams of the oath he pledged to the teenage bride he scarcely knows and the child he's never met. Where do his loyalties really lie? To Hitler or to the life he left behind in the bombed ruins of his homeland?Beneath the wintry mountains, in the hell of Black Camp 21, suspicion and fear swirl around like the endless snow. And while the Reich crumbles - and his brutal companions plan their assault - Max's toughest battle is only just beginning.Inspired by terrifying actual events, Black Camp 21 takes readers on a gut-wrenching journey from the battlefields of France to its shocking climax in a camp which still stands today.
Loyalties: A Novel of World War II
Thomas Fleming - 1994
In Berlin, Berthe von Hoffman dreams of an angel in the depths, embracing her husband's submarine – and remembers Kristallnacht, when Hitler declared all-out war on the Jews. The stench of evil in that memory draws her to the headquarters of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, enigmatic head of the German secret service – and guiding spirit of the Schwarze Kapelle, the circle of courageous men and women who comprise the secret dangerous resistance to Nazism. Aboard the USS Spencer Lewis off Iceland, Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Trumbull Talbot is denouncing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unconstitutional undeclared war against Germany when a torpedo fired by Berthe's husband, Kapitanleutnant Ernst von Hoffmann, cut the destroyer in half. Out of this conjunction grows a tormented tangle of love and jealousy and patriotic deceit when the three meet in Spain after Pearl Harbor has catapulted American into the war. By that time, Talbot's criticism of the president has wrecked both his naval career and his marriage to Annie Richman, daughter of a congressman whose power depends on FDR's political wizardry. When Talbot returns from Spain to urge negotiations with Canaris and other leaders of the German resistance, Annie, now a powerful journalist, becomes a player in the struggle for the mind of the intransigent, mortally ill president. At its gripping climax, Loyalties draws everyone into an anguished confrontation with the limits of patriotism and God's baffling role in the middle of human destiny. From murderous contests between rival intelligence agencies in Spain to the labyrinthine political machinations in Washington, London, and Berlin to warfare beneath the North Atlantic, Loyalties is a dazzling mosaic of men and women caught in the crossfire of history – yet finding in the midst of destruction and chaos inexplicable glimpse of meaning and hope.