Bent Northrop Memorial Library

"When America entered World War II, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books. Outraged librarians sent donated books to our troops. Then the War Department joined the publishing industry in an extraordinary program: 120 million copies comprised of 1,200 titles printed in small, lightweight paperbacks suitable for pockets and rucksacks. Beloved by the troops and still fondly remembered, theirs is an inspiring story"--From...

American women - American wives - have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands...

Three displaced persons, Polish Jew Pavel Mandl, Polish widow Fela, and smuggler Chaim, form a makeshift family as they struggle to rebuild their lives in postwar Germany and New York City in the decades after World War II.

"In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism--but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion....

Roman Halter was a spirited, optimistic schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gathered behind the curtains to watch the Volksdeutsche (German Polish) neighbors of their small town in western Poland greet the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags. Within days, the family home had been seized, twelve-year-old Roman had become a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, he silently witnessed his Jewish classmates...

National Book Award Winner: The definitive account of Nazi Germany and “one of the most important works of history of our time” (The New York Times).
 
When the Third Reich fell, it fell swiftly. The Nazis had little time to destroy their memos, their letters, or their diaries. William L. Shirer’s sweeping account of the Third Reich uses these unique sources, combined with his experience living...

One month after the end of World War II, amid the jubilation in the streets of France, there are throngs of people stunned by the recovery work ahead. Every bridge, road, and rail line, every church and school and hospital, has been destroyed. Disparate factions--from Communists, to Resistance fighters, to federalists, to those who supported appeasement of the Nazis--must somehow unite and rebuild their devastated country. Asher lost his family during...

"A wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and highly readable history of Britain's postwar Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6." ―The Wall Street Journal
From Berlin to the Congo, from Moscow to the back streets of London, these are the true stories of the agents on the front lines of British intelligence. And the truth is sometimes more remarkable than the spy novels of Ian Fleming or John le Carré.

...

For fans of “Radium Girls” and history and WWII buffs, “The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line” takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII, in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come. “The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line” are the heroes of the Greatest Generation...

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable World War II tale of a quiet bookworm who becomes history's deadliest female sniper. Based on a true story. In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kiev (now known as Kyiv), wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son--but Hitler's invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle...