Book picks similar to
Courage in a White Coat by Mary Schwaner


non-fiction
history
nonfiction
historical-nonfiction

Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years and After, 1939-1962


Blanche Wiesen Cook - 2016
    The long-awaited third and final volume takes us through World War II, FDR’s death, the founding of the UN, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962. It follows the arc of war and the evolution of a marriage, as the first lady realized the cost of maintaining her principles even as the country and her husband were not prepared to adopt them. Eleanor Roosevelt continued to struggle for her core issues—economic security, New Deal reforms, racial equality, and rescue—when they were sidelined by FDR while he marshaled the country through war. The chasm between Eleanor and Franklin grew, and the strains on their relationship were as political as they were personal. She also had to negotiate the fractures in the close circle of influential women around her at Val-Kill, but through it she gained confidence in her own vision, even when forced to amend her agenda when her beliefs clashed with government policies on such issues as neutrality, refugees, and eventually the threat of communism. These years—the war years—made Eleanor Roosevelt the woman she became: leader, visionary, guiding light. FDR’s death in 1945 changed her world, but she was far from finished, returning to the spotlight as a crucial player in the founding of the United Nations. This is a sympathetic but unblinking portrait of a marriage and of a woman whose passion and commitment has inspired generations of Americans to seek a decent future for all people. Modest and self-deprecating, a moral force in a turbulent world, Eleanor Roosevelt was unique.

The Search for Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews, Expanded Edition


Michael Good - 2005
    Who was this enigmatic officer Pearl Good had spoken of so often?After five years of research--interviewing survivors, assembling a team that could work to open German files untouched for fifty years, following every lead he could, Good was able to uncover the amazing tale of one man's remarkable courage. And in April 2005 Karl Plagge joined Oskar Schindler and 380 other Germans as a "Righteous among Nations," honored by the State of Israel for protecting and saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust.This expanded edition features new photographs and a new epilogue on the impact of the discovery of Karl Plagge--especially the story of 83-year-old Alfons von Deschwanden, who, after fifty years of silence, came forward as a veteran of Plagge's unit. His testimony is now part of this growing witness to truth.

Kiss The Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs In Vietnam


Monika Jensen-Stevenson - 1990
    government has knowingly suppressed evidence of American soldiers still held captive in Southeast Asia. Over the course of a five-year investigation, the authors became convinced that the safety and interests of these prisoners and their families were being sacrificed to American foreign policy. 16 pages of photographs.

My Train to Freedom: A Jewish Boy's Journey from Nazi Europe to a Life of Activism


Ivan A. Backer - 2016
    The final train was canceled September 1 when Hitler invaded Poland. The 250 children scheduled for that train were left on the platform and later transported to concentration camps and presumably perished.Detailed in this page-turning true story is Backer’s dangerous escape, his boyhood in England, his perilous 1944 voyage to America, and his mantra today. Now he is an eighty-six-year-old who remains an activist for peace and justice. He has been influenced by his Jewish heritage, his Christian boarding school education in England, and the always present question, “For what purpose was I spared the Holocaust?”My Train to Freedom was thoroughly researched and shaped by Backer’s own memories. It includes interviews he conducted in 1980 in Czech with his mother and her sister, later translated into English; a collection of conversations he had with his older brother and cousin; insights gained from the Czech film, Nicky’s Family, about the Kindertransport; and concludes with never-before-published death march accounts by two family members.

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany


Sigrid MacRae - 2014
    While visiting Paris in 1927, her American mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post�World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancing Russian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.A World Elsewhere is a stirring narrative of two hostages to history and a mother’s courageous fight to save her family.

Inga: Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect


Scott Farris - 2016
    Kennedy's life, and also Adolf Hitler's special guest at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was an actress, a foreign correspondent, a popular Washington columnist, an explorer who lived among a tribe of headhunters, one of Hollywood's most influential gossip columnists, and a suspected Nazi spy. The latter nearly got Kennedy cashiered out of the Navy, but instead set in motion the chain of events that led to him becoming a war hero. Inga lived where gossip intersects with history, and her story, as told by author Scott Farris in Inga, is a rollicking story that demonstrates how private lives influence public events. It is also a Hitchcockian tale of how difficult it can be to prove innocence when unjustly accused, and how, as Inga phrased it, what was once a halo can slip down and become a hangman's noose. In addition to her romance with Kennedy and the attention of Hitler, Arvad married three times -- to an Egyptian diplomat who insisted they never had divorced, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos whom Charlie Chaplin considered a genius, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She also had affairs with noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, the prolific writer John Gunther, and Winston's Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. She was pursued by Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, and Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, reputedly the richest man in the world at the time, offered her $1 million to have his child. Inga was Miss Denmark of 1931, but by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty alone, but for her joie de vivre. She was a genius with people, she was daring and adventurous, and she was their equal in intellect. Like Isak Dinesen and Clare Boothe Luce, Inga Arvad led a life that both sheds light on and defies the stereotypes of women of her time.

My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900-1944


Martin Doerry - 2002
    This book presents a series of letters which offer an insight into the life of this woman under persecution in the Nazi regime.

I Am Sasha


Anita Selzer - 2018
    One mother’s incredible courage. Based on an astounding true story.It is German-occupied Poland in 1942 and Jewish lives are at risk. Nazi soldiers order young boys to pull down their trousers to see if they are circumcised. Many are summarily shot or sent to the camps. A remarkable mother takes an ingenious step. To avoid suspicion, she trains her teenage son to be a girl: his clothing, voice, hair, manners and more. Together, mother and son face incredible odds as their story sweeps backwards and forwards across occupied Europe.

Swimming Across: A Memoir


Andrew S. Grove - 2001
    Grove. Photos throughout.

The Lost Brothers: A Family's Decades-Long Search


Jack El-Hai - 2019
    The Klein brothers—Kenneth Jr., 8; David, 6; and Danny, 4—never came home. When two caps turned up on the ice of the Mississippi River, investigators concluded that the boys had drowned and closed the case. The boys’ parents were unconvinced, hoping against hope that their sons would still be found. Sixty long years would pass before two sheriff’s deputies, with new information in hand and the FBI on board, could convince the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to reopen the case.This is the story of that decades-long ordeal, one of the oldest known active missing-child investigations, told by a writer whose own research for an article in 1998 sparked new interest in the boys’ disappearance. Beginning in 2012, when deputies Jessica Miller and Lance Salls took up the Kleins’ cause, author Jack El-Hai returns to the mountain of clues amassed through the years, then follows the trail traced over time by the boys’ indefatigable parents, right back to those critical moments in 1951. Told in brisk, longform journalism style, The Lost Brothers captures the Kleins’ initial terror and confusion but also the unstinting effort, with its underlying faith, that carried them from psychics to reporters to private investigators and TV producers—and ultimately produced results that cast doubt on the drowning verdict and even suggested possible suspects in the boys’ abduction. An intimate portrait of a parent’s worst nightmare and its terrible toll on a family, the book is also a genuine mystery, spinning out suspense at every missed turn or potential lead, along with its hope for resolution in the end.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy


Thomas Buergenthal - 2007
    Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.

The Note Through the Wire: The Incredible True Story of a Prisoner of War and a Resistance Heroine


Doug Gold - 2019
    One an underground resistance fighter, a bold young woman determined to vanquish the enemy occupiers; the other a prisoner of war, a man longing to escape the confines of the camp so he can battle again. A crumpled note passes between these two strangers, slipped through the wire of the compound, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.Woven through their tales of great bravery, daring escapes, betrayal, torture, and retaliation is their remarkable love story that survived against all odds. This is an extraordinary account of two ordinary people who found love during the unimaginable hardships of Hitler’s barbaric regime as told by their son-in-law Doug Gold, who decided to tell their story from the moment he heard about their remarkable tale of bravery, resilience, and resistance.

The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power


Peter Ross Range - 2020
    Culminating in Hitler's historic climb to totalitarian reign, this period marks his progression through the shifting political maze of the Weimar Republic and the tumultuous rise of the Nazi Party. Far from an irresistible force of politics, Hitler's passage was one underscored by personal power plays, economic instability, gloating triumphs, and near failures. A political chapter that spans Germany's wobbly recovery from World War I through years of growing prosperity and crippling depression, this period marks Hitler's unrelenting struggle for control over his radical, raucous movement. It includes brushes with power and quests for revenge, non-stop electioneering and American-style campaign tactics and, for Hitler, moments of immense success and feared humiliation. Following an improbable, serpentine journey, The Unfathomable Ascent is a complex story with one dangerous climax: Hitler's sweeping ascent into political power, and the western world's descent into historic darkness.

Murder in Battle Creek: The Mysterious Death of Daisy Zick (True Crime)


Blaine Lee Pardoe - 2013
    No fewer than three witnessescaught a glimpse of the killer, yet today, it remainsone of Michigan’s most sensational unsolved crimes. The act of puresavagery rocked not only the community but also the Kellogg Company, where sheworked. Here, Blaine Pardoe artfully takes the reader into this true crime thriller. Utilizing long-sealed policefiles and interviews with the surviving investigators,the true story of the investigation can finally be told. Who were thekey suspects? What evidence does the police still have on this five-decades-oldcold case? Just how close did this murder come to being solved? Is the killerstill alive? These questions and more are masterfully brought to the forefrontfor true crime fans and armchair detectives.

Iron Spy: The True Story of the Greatest Double Agent in World War II (Espionage)


Ethan Quinn - 2019
    While his early life was rife with petty crime, gang activity and a dishonourable discharge from the British military, Chapman’s unique skills were eventually sought out by Nazi Germany, and after convincing them he could use his criminal contacts to sabotage the English forces, he was quickly recruited. But Chapman’s loyalty to his country knew no limits. A talented, handsome, and reckless Englishman, Chapman was a traitor on the surface but a fearless patriot on the inside. After cracking Germany’s military code, the British sought Chapman for their own affairs, and Chapman was happy to oblige. Eventually being awarded the prestigious Nazi Iron Cross for services to Germany while acting as a double agent for Britain, Chapman’s espionage efforts involved masterful deceit and feats which few men alive could ever boast of. Eddie Chapman’s life story is an unbelievable journey of crime, jail-breaks, treachery, and love. He was responsible for saving countless lives during his career, cementing himself as the ultimate double agent during World War II.