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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations
Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France
by Nicholas Shakespeare is a transcendent work of narrative
nonfiction in the vein of The Hare with Amber Eyes.
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his
late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this
discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden
past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his
childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman
who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals and
photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious
existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy
during World War II.
As a young boy, Shakespeare had always believed that his aunt
was a member of the Resistance and had been tortured by the
Germans. The truth turned out to be far more complicated.
Piecing together fragments of his aunt's remarkable and tragic
story, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving
portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and
a spellbinding slice of history.
"An author's quest to discover what really happened to his uncle
in World War II"
To all appearances, Anthony "Tony" Korkuc was just another
casualty of World War II. A gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress,
Korkuc was lost on a bombing mission over Germany, and his family
believed that his body had never been recovered. But when they
learned in 1995 that Tony was actually buried at Arlington National
Cemetery, his nephew Bob Korkuc set out on a seven-year quest to
learn the true fate of an uncle he never knew.
"Finding a Fallen Hero" is a compelling story that blends a
wartime drama with a primer on specialized research. Author Bob
Korkuc initially set out to learn how his Uncle Tony came to rest
at Arlington. In the process, he also unraveled the mystery of what
occurred over the skies of Germany half a century ago.
Korkuc dug up military documents and private letters and
interviewed people in both the United States and Germany. He
tracked down surviving crewmembers and even found the brother of
the Luftwaffe pilot who downed the B-17. Dozens of photographs help
readers envision both Tony Korkuc's fateful flight and his nephew's
dogged search for the truth.
A gripping chronicle of exhaustive research, "Finding a Fallen
Hero" will strike a chord with any reader who has lost a family
member to war. And it will inspire others to satisfy their own
unanswered questions.
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation,
Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what
the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain.
In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some
10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent,
two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as "domestic enemy
aliens" during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with
workplaces, social groups, and political alliances-in short,
networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki's Japanese
Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are
the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of
networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the
camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed
look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated
community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and
resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of
Heart Mountain's residents and their interconnections-family,
political, employment, social, and geospatial networks-using
historical "big data" drawn from the War Relocation Authority and
narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain
Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people
married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of
the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized
and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most
individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies
despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart
Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for
debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at
Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a
community created under duress within the larger American society,
and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to
official history.
Lew Wallace (1827-1905) won fame for his novel, Ben-Hur, and for
his negotiations with William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, during
the Lincoln County Wars of 1878-81. He was a successful lawyer, a
notable Indiana politician, and a capable military administrator.
And yet, as history and his own memoir tell us, Wallace would have
traded all these accolades for a moment of military glory in the
Civil War to save the Union. Where previous accounts have sought to
discredit or defend Wallace's performance as a general in the war,
author Christopher R. Mortenson takes a more nuanced approach.
Combining military biography, historical analysis, and political
insight, Politician in Uniform provides an expanded and balanced
view of Wallace's military career - and offers the reader a new
understanding of the experience of a voluntary general like Lew
Wallace. A rising politician from Indiana, Wallace became a Civil
War general through his political connections. While he had much
success as a regimental commander, he ran into trouble at the
brigade and division levels. A natural rivalry and tension between
West Pointers and political generals might have accounted for some
of these difficulties, but many, as Mortenson shows us, were of
Wallace's own making. A temperamental officer with a ""rough""
conception of manhood, Wallace often found his mentors wanting,
disrespected his superiors, and vigorously sought opportunities for
glorious action in the field, only to perform poorly when given the
chance. Despite his flaws, Mortenson notes, Wallace contributed
both politically and militarily to the war effort - in the fight
for Fort Donelson and at the Battle of Shiloh, in the defense of
Cincinnati and southern Indiana, and in the administration of
Baltimore and the Middle Department. Detailing these and other
instances of Wallace's success along with his weaknesses and
failures, Mortenson provides an unusually thorough and instructive
picture of this complicated character in his military service. His
book clearly demonstrates the unique complexities of evaluating the
performance of a politician in uniform.
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