Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan by the United States. Now threats of atomic war loom and fade whenever one country gets mad at another. I wondered about the path we took to making the bomb and this led me to Denise Kiernan’s book The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II, a highly ... Read More...
Above the East China Sea
How has he not had it drummed into him that brats don’t whine? We don’t plead. We don’t need. We require nothing. Not even real roots. We’re air ferns. In Sarah Bird's new novel Above the East China Sea the island of Okinawa is the centerpiece of a multi-generational drama that plays out during World War II and modern times. Tamiko is a native of the island in the 1940s when ... Read More...
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
It’s a testament to author Francine Prose’s prodigious talent that she can bring together a cross-dressing lesbian Nazi spy, a French baroness, and a Hungarian photographer, and not have it read like a bad joke. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 takes all of the characters listed, adds an American author, the photographer’s French girlfriend, and the Chameleon Club’s ... Read More...
Dominion: A Novel
What-if books can go terribly wrong. They require a great deal of thought, generally because they are written about a time when a change in events would bring a massive change to history. In the novel Dominion, C.J. Sansom writes about Great Britain in the 1950s if it had not declared war on Germany but had held to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s desire for appeasement. The novel ... Read More...
The Gods of Heavenly Punishment
There are numerous novels about World War II and the events leading up to it but TheThe Gods of Heavenly Punishment: A Novel comes from a perspective not often seen—that of life in Japan in the late 1930s. Author Jennifer Cody Epstein intermingles the lives of disparate characters that come together and move apart against the backdrop of war. Anton Reynolds is an American ... Read More...
The Light in the Ruins
The Light in the Ruins, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel, is set at the Villa Chimera in Tuscany in 1943, a pastoral estate where the war is largely unseen. The Rosatis are a titled Italian family and while they have one son preparing for the Allied invasion in Sicily and another who works at a museum trying to control the flow of Italian art out of the country, their lives ... Read More...
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