Book picks similar to
King's Counsellor Abdication and War: The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles by Alan Lascelles
royalty
history
biography
world-war-ii
Surviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz
Eva Mozes Kor - 2009
While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele and subjected to sadistic medical experiments and forced to fight daily for their own survival. Through this book, readers will learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil. The book also includes an epilogue on Eva's recovery from this experience and her remarkable decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Through her museum and her lectures, she has dedicated her life to giving testimony on the Holocaust, providing a message of hope for people who have suffered, and working toward goals of forgiveness, peace, and the elimination of hatred and prejudice in the world.
Clara's War
Clara Kramer - 2008
Three years later, in the small town of Żółkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Clara Kramer was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug cellar. Living above and protecting them were the Becks.Mr. Beck was a womaniser, a drunkard and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life throughout the war to keep his charges safe. Nevertheless, life with Mr. Beck was far from predictable. From the house catching fire, to Beck's affair with Clara's cousin, to the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room just above, Clara's War transports you into the dark, cramped bunker, and sits you next to the families as they hold their breath time and again.Sixty years later, Clara Kramer has created a memoir that is lyrical, dramatic and heartbreakingly compelling. Despite the worst of circumstances, this is a story full of hope and survival, courage and love.
When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II
Molly Guptill Manning - 2014
Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war.Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. When Books Went to War is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike.
The School of Restoration: The story of one Ugandan woman who has given hope to hundreds of female survivors of war and violence
Alice Achan - 2020
She spent five years on the run from the brutal LRA, and then cared for her young nieces after their mother died of AIDs, losing them one by one to the disease. Their deaths plunged her into depression, which only began to lift after she took in an unexpected guest: a pregnant teenage girl, kidnapped and assaulted by the LRA, who had escaped captivity with her toddler.Spurred on by her young friend's plight, Alice began to house and nurture survivors of the sexual violence that was a trademark of the LRA's twenty-year campaign. Out of this rose the Pader Girls Academy, which Alice saw as a 'School of Restoration'. It has helped hundreds of girls, many left with babies and HIV as a result of their enslavement. Alice recognised the humanity and potential in these girl mothers, who had been rejected or were trapped in their villages without hope.Written in Alice's powerful yet understated voice, The School of Restoration is a compelling story of hope, forgiveness, redemption and the human capacity to survive and even thrive against the backdrop of war and chaos.
Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
Janet Wallach - 1996
Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence's brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire. In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements–a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds wit the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.