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Beasts of No Nation |
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| Author: |
Uzodinma Iweala |
 Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
006079867X |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Iweala's visceral debut is unrelenting in its brutality and unremitting in its intensity. Agu, the precocious, gentle son of a village schoolteacher father and a Bible-reading mother, is dragooned into an unnamed West African nation's mad civil war—a slip of a boy forced, almost overnight, to shoulder a soldier's bloody burden. The preteen protagonist is molded into a fighting man by his demented guerrilla leader and, after witnessing his father's savage slaying, by an inchoate need to belong to some kind of family, no matter how depraved. He becomes a killer, gripped by a muddled sense of revenge as he butchers a mother and daughter when his ragtag unit raids a defenseless village; starved for both food and affection, he is sodomized by his commandant and rewarded with extra food scraps... |
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The Hard Way |
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| Author: |
Lee Child |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0385336691 |
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In bestseller Child's 10th novel to feature ex-army MP Jack Reacher (after 2005's One Shot), a sidewalk cafe encounter in New York City plunges Reacher into one of his most challenging—and thoroughly engrossing—adventures to date. Acting out of "reflex and professional curiosity" (and the promise of a generous fee), Reacher agrees to help sinister ex-army officer Edward Lane, whose posse of six Special Forces veterans are even more ominous than he, track down his kidnapped daughter and trophy wife. Since the kidnapping of wife number one five years earlier ended in her death, Lane cautions Reacher that he will not brook police interference ("You break your word, I'll put your eyes out"). From Lane's quarters in the West Side's venerable Dakota apartment building to the shady... |
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Soldier of God |
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| Author: |
David Hagberg |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0765306220 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Publishers Weekly
After CIA director Kirk McGarvey and his wife, Katy, barely survive a spectacularly ruthless terrorist attack on an Alaskan cruise ship, McGarvey (last seen in last year's By Dawn's Early Light) vows to track down and kill the terrorist leader known only as Khalil. This should be a simple CIA assassination (McGarvey's forte), but there's a catch: Khalil may be Prince Abdul Salman, a billionaire playboy member of the Saudi royal family, well connected to the White House and U.S. businesses. Given information pointing to a second 9/11-scale al-Qaeda attack, the U.S. president discounts Saudi complicity in terrorism, including Salman/Khalil; McGarvey resigns and goes after Khalil on his own. Revenge drives Khalil and McGarvey both, and McGarvey's wife also has a reason to want Khalil dead. Hagberg (who also writes... |
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Good Fight: How World War II Was Won |
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| Author: |
Stephen E. Ambrose |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0689843615 |
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Book Review
Packed with photos (color and black-and-white), maps, personal stories, and concise, readable descriptions of the major events of World War II, bestselling author Stephen E. Ambrose's The Good Fight is a stunning resource for students of history. Though this horrific war has been written about innumerable times over the last half-century, this chronicle for young readers (14 and older) is one of the most vivid, insightful, and straightforward perspectives around. Ambrose pulls no punches. In the first paragraph of his introduction, he reminds us that "more people were killed, more houses, apartment buildings, factories, bridges, and other works of man were destroyed than ever before or since." From Hitler's rise to power to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor to the air war over Europe to the War Crimes Trials, the major ... |
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Our Fathers' War |
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| Author: |
Tom Mathews |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0767914201 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Publishers Weekly
After more than 30 years at Newsweek, where he served as New York bureau chief among other roles, Mathews (Hazardous Duty) turned to writing books, often centering his fiction and nonfiction around the military. His latest project finds him, at "a ridiculously old age," sorting through "steamer trunks" of baggage from an American childhood spent in the shadow of WWII and its aftermath. After an opening chapter that briskly and episodically tells the story of his childhood and struggles with a Greatest Generation father now in his 80s, Mathews, following the advice of an old song, musters nine other father-son dyads and devotes a chapter to each, telling their stories and using them to reflect and refract his relationship with his father, rekindled after years of dormancy. It's a conceit that works terrifically;... |
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Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor |
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| Author: |
Harry Mazer |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0689841604 |
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From Publishers Weekly
A 14-year-old boy, newly arrived in 1941 Hawaii, witnesses the attack on Pearl Harbor. In a starred review, PW said, "Mazer successfully fuses a strong portrayal of Adam's transformation with both a vivid account of the attack and subtle suggestions of the complexities of Japanese-American relations as played out in particular lives." Ages 10-14. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Gr 5-9-Adam Pelko has lived for only two weeks in Honolulu, where his father is an officer assigned to the USS Arizona in nearby Pearl Harbor. When he befriends Davi Mori, a high school classmate whose parents are Japanese, Adam's rigid father forbids him to associate with Davi, fearing that the anti-Japanese sentiment so rampant on the island will tarnish... |
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German Boy |
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| Author: |
Wolfgang W. E. Samuel |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0767908244 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Publishers Weekly
In 1945 Samuel, then 10 years old, fled his home in Sagan, Germany, with his mother and younger sister, escaping just ahead of the Russian army's arrival. The author's memoir vividly depicts what it was like to be a child refugee (confused and frightened) in postwar Germany, constantly searching for food and a haven. Since Hedy, the author's mother, had been planning to divorce his father (a Luftwaffe officer), she refused to join him, but instead took Samuel and his sister to stay with her parents in the small town of Strasburg, which shortly became a Russian-occupied zone. Although the author had earlier viewed his mother as self-centered and unloving, he describes how his image of her changed during their years on the run, when he saw her make heroic efforts to keep her children alive. Attractive to men and... |
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The Red Badge of Courage |
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| Author: |
Stephen Crane |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0486434222 |
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Children at War |
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| Author: |
Peter Warren Singer |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0375423494 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Over six million child combatants were killed or injured in the past decade. In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former adviser to the U.S. military, explores the rise and expansion of child soldiery. Children, Singer finds, enter armies and militias in numerous ways: as voluntary soldiers, indoctrinated to kill; as involuntary soldiers, forced into the militia or military by cruel adults; as child-terrorists; as members of all-child armies (such as the Hitler Youth); and as sexual slaves for superior officers. Singer (Corporate Warriors) explores different means of training and indoctrination, often through interviews with child-soldiers, as well as with adults who have fought against them and others who have tried to rehabilitate children forced into... |
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Power of One |
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| Author: |
Bryce Courtenay |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
034541005X |
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From Publishers Weekly
"Episodic and bursting with incident, this sprawling memoir of an English boy's lonely childhood in South Africa during WW II pays moderate attention to questions of race but concerns itself primarily with epic melodrama," noted PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
"Unabashedly uplifting."
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
Set in a world torn apart, where man enslaves his fellow man and freedom remains elusive, THE POWER OF ONE is the moving story of one young man's search for the love that binds friends, the passion that binds lovers, and the realization that it takes only one to change the world. A weak and friendless boy growing up in South Africa during... |
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Witnesses of War |
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| Author: |
Nicholas Stargardt |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
1400040884 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Handicapped German children taken from their families before WWII, girls of all nations raped by marauding soldiers, Jewish children shoved into ghettos: as Stargardt shows in this well-researched and horrific history, the lives of children were ravaged by Hitler's goals and the war he produced. Like Lynn Nicholas in her recent and also excellent Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, Stargardt, a historian at Oxford, tells his story through the children's eyes using diaries and oral histories as well as other documentary sources. To be a child during the war, he notes, could be both easier and harder than it was to be an adult. Children often proved more resilient in overcoming physical and mental injuries. At the same time, they lacked the ability to directly express the pain... |
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World War II |
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| Author: |
Simon Adams |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0756607434 |
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Book Review
Take an eyewitness view of the complexities, atrocities, and heroics of war with World War II, from DK's Eyewitness series. In keeping with all the books in this remarkable reference collection, pages are jam-packed with crisp, vivid photographs, illustrations, documents, and maps, as well as fascinating narrative and captions. Under chapter headings such as "A world divided," "Bombing raids," "Women at work," "Road to Stalingrad," "Propaganda and morale," "The Holocaust," "D-Day invasion," and "The atomic bomb," the events of the war are described and illustrated in compelling detail. Readers learn about life under German occupation, remarkable secret inventions (poison pens, matchbox cameras, pipes with a secret compartment), how soldiers managed to overcome the enemy, what the inside of a British midget submarine looked... |
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God's Children |
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| Author: |
Harold Coyle |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0812575385 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
From Booklist
For those who went to war with an M-1 rifle, a carbine, or a Colt 45, and who don't know a BMP from an M-16, Coyle writes in a foreign language. But for professional soldiers, active or otherwise, wanna-bes, armchair generals, and general military buffs, Coyle wrote the book--this one and others--on land warfare. The God's Children of the title--peacekeepers, according to the biblical saying--are the Third Platoon of C Company, part of a NATO force in near-future Slovakia attempting to keep the lid on a boiling pot nobody seems to care much about. Coyle's main protagonists are First Lieutenant Nathan Dixon and Second Lieutenant Gerald Reider, fresh from West Point. The good news is that both young men survive the firefights that are part of their peacekeeping mission. The not-so-good news is that Coyle's story could be... |
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Children of the Holocaust |
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| Author: |
Helen Epstein |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0140112847 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
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Code Talker: A Novel About The Navajo Marines of World War Two |
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| Author: |
Joseph Bruchac |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0803729219 |
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From School Library Journal
Grade 5 Up–In the measured tones of a Native American storyteller, Bruchac assumes the persona of a Navajo grandfather telling his grandchildren about his World War II experiences. Protagonist Ned Begay starts with his early schooling at an Anglo boarding school, where the Navajo language is forbidden, and continues through his Marine career as a "code talker," explaining his long silence until "de-classified" in 1969. Begay's lifelong journey honors the Navajos and other Native Americans in the military, and fosters respect for their culture. Bruchac's gentle prose presents a clear historical picture of young men in wartime, island hopping across the Pacific, waging war in the hells of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, and Iwo Jima. Nonsensational and accurate, Bruchac's tale is quietly inspiring, even for... |
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Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War |
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| Author: |
Yukio Tsuchiya |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0395861373 |
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From Publishers Weekly
A zookeeper narrates the story of how there came to be graves at the zoo: when Tokyo was showered with bombs during the bleak days of World War II, the authorities feared that if the zoo were destroyed, the animals might accidentally be freed and wreak havoc on the city. So they decided that all the zoo animals would be killed. But the elephants wouldn't eat the poisonous food they were offered, and the needles in the syringes containing poison broke before they could penetrate the elephants' rough skin. So the elephants were starved to death, a slow and painful process watched by the zookeepers who loved them. An upsetting story for children or adults, this powerfully conveys the deadly side effects of war. Lewin's watercolors show the massive gray bodies in their state of decline; it is impossible not to... |
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Children of the Flames |
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| Author: |
Lucette Matalon Lagnado |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0140169318 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Only 160 of 3000 twins subjected to genetic experimentation by Mengele survived until 1945. The reprint of this important addition to Holocaust literature is scheduled to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 30. Photos. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-- A horrifying yet spellbinding account. Although Mengele was a mediocre doctor, he was encouraged in his pursuit of "genetic research" to create a "master Aryan race" with the concentration camp at Auschwitz providing an ample supply of specimens for his unscientific, poorly documented experiments. Twins were his fixation, and this book interviews some of the estimated 100 survivors from an initial sample of 3000 young people. The fascination of this book is that it... |
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Fighting Ground |
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| Author: |
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Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0064401855 |
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From Publishers Weekly
The compelling story of a young boy's first encounter with war and how it changes him. Ages 9-up. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-- H.
"Convincingly portrays Jonathan's passage from naive boy to young man."
See all Editorial Reviews
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The Girl in the Picture |
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| Author: |
Denise Chong |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0140280219 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
Book Review
When Nick Ut photographed 9-year-old Kim Phuc running down a road, her body aflame with napalm, he turned a terrified girl into a living symbol of the Vietnam War's horror. Even after the war, the North Vietnamese government made the severely scarred Kim a reluctant poster girl for American atrocities. Although her parents, once relatively prosperous South Vietnamese peasants, were reduced to dire poverty when the state took over her mother's noodle shop, Kim was allowed to receive further medical treatment in Germany, to visit the Soviet Union, and to attend the University of Havana. These privileges did not assuage her spiritual turmoil: Why had she been singled out for fame when so many others suffered and died? Searching for answers, Kim converted to Christianity and in 1992 defected with her husband to Canada, where... |
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