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History and Current Events December 2019
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| A Castle in Wartime: One Family, Their Missing Sons, and the Fight to Defeat the Nazis by Catherine BaileyWhat it's about: an aristocratic German Italian family living in northern Italy who resisted the Nazi regime and were later targeted for their connections to a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.
Read it for: a pulse-pounding story of courage and survival.
For fans of: Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. |
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| Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West by H.W. BrandsWhat it is: a sweeping yet concise three-century survey of the American West.
What sets it apart: Historian H.W. Brands' demythologizing study argues that it was violent federal intervention, not rugged individualism, that facilitated westward expansion.
Don't miss: profiles of little-known figures who shaped the region, including the Chinese laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad. |
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| Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War by S.C. GwynneWhat it is: a vivid chronicle of the Civil War's decisive battles.
Is it for you? This unsparing account doesn't shy away from the battlefield devastation, the conditions of the POW camps, and the mistreatment of black soldiers on both sides of the conflict.
About the author: Journalist and historian S.C. Gwynne was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2010's Empire of the Summer Moon. |
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| Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames by Lara MaiklemFeaturing: British editor Lara Maiklem, whose scavenging for artifacts on the banks of the River Thames has led to many unusual discoveries and surprising revelations.
Want a taste? "The objects that are hidden in the mud at Greenwich fill in the details that are missing from history books."
Don't miss: After finding a bottle believed to be from a prison ship, Maiklem's research leads her to an ancestor who was transported to Australia on a prison ship. |
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| One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene WeingartenHow it began: After enlisting the help of strangers to pick a random date out of a hat, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten spent years researching the events of December 28, 1986.
What's inside: murders, medical discoveries, freak accidents, and more; updated interviews with people involved in the headlines of the day.
Reviewers say: "a trove of compelling human-interest pieces with long reverberations" (Publishers Weekly). |
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Fake News Nation : The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America
by James W. Cortada
After the election of Donald Trump as president, people in the United States and across large swaths of Europe, Latin America, and Asia engaged in the most intensive discussion in modern times about falsehoods pronounced by public officials. Fake facts in their various forms have long been present in American life, particularly in its politics, public discourse, and business activities - going back to the time when the country was formed. This book explores the long tradition of fake facts, in their various guises, in American history. It is one of the first historical studies to place the long history of lies and misrepresentation squarely in the middle of American political, business, and science policy rhetoric. In Fake News Nation, James Cortada and William Aspray present a series of case studies that describe how lies and fake facts were used over the past two centuries in important instances in American history. Cortada and Aspray give readers a perspective on fake facts as they appear today and as they are likely to appear in the future.
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Big Wonderful Thing : A History of Texas
by Stephen Harrigan
Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times-bestselling author Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists.
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Return to the Reich : a Holocaust refugee's secret mission to defeat the Nazis
by Eric Lichtblau
"The remarkable story of Fred Mayer, a German-born Jew who escaped Nazi Germany only to return as an American commando on a secret mission behind enemy lines. Growing up in Germany, Freddy Mayer witnessed the Nazis' rise to power. When he was sixteen, his family made the decision to flee to the United States--they were among the last German Jews to escape, in 1938. In America, Freddy tried enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor, only to be rejected as an "enemy alien" because he was German. He was soon recruited to the OSS, the country's first spy outfit before the CIA. Freddy, joined by Dutch Jewish refugee Hans Wynberg and Nazi defector Franz Weber, parachuted into Austria as the leader of Operation Greenup, meant to deter Hitler's last stand. He posed as a Nazi officer and a French POW for months, dispatching reports to the OSS via Hans, holed up with a radio in a nearby attic. The reports contained a goldmine of information, provided key intelligence about the Battle of the Bulge, and allowed the Allies to bomb twenty Nazi trains. On the verge of the Allied victory, Freddy was captured by the Gestapo and tortured and waterboarded for days. Remarkably, he persuaded the Nazi commander for the region to surrender, completing one of the most successful OSSmissions of the war. Based on years of research and interviews with Mayer himself, whom the author was able to meet only months before his death at the age of ninety-four, Return to the Reich is an eye-opening, unforgettable narrative of World War II heroism"
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Midnight in Samarra : the true story of WMD, greed, and high crimes in Iraq
by Frank Gregory Ford
Gregory Ford, an intelligence agent and medic, was in Iraq for only a short time—from the invasion in March 2003 until early June of the same year, when he was strapped to a stretcher, drugged, and “renditioned” out of Iraq in a clandestine and criminal operation at the behest of his command, who were frantically trying to silence him. But why? Midnight in Samarra is the shocking true story of one soldier’s attempt to speak up and report the abuse and torture he saw being inflicted on the local population, as well as secret, incriminating, enormous Iraqi arms stores of American-made Weapons of Mass Destruction with bills of lading implicating, among others, famous political families. His warnings about simmering anti-American fury of the local populace were ignored and suppressed by his command; hundreds of millions of dollars in cash seized in the home of Saddam Hussein’s main banker as a result of Ford's intelligence work vanished without a trace. Ford’s information about Hussein’s location, which could have led to the dictator's apprehension six months before his actual capture, was also ignored and suppressed. As Ford was filing charges against his superior officers, they seized his weapons (illegal in a war zone), tried to declare him insane, abducted him by force, restrained him, administered a dangerous mind-altering drug during a Medevac flight, and tried to interrogate him while he was under. Years later, Gregory Ford is still trying to get justice. His command—and high-ups in both the military and the government—lied, dissembled, obfuscated, danced, and dodged while Ford endured libel, slander, and innuendo, feared for his life, and, nearly a decade after the drugging on the plane, learned that the chemical injected into him had done permanent damage to his heart and nervous system. Midnight in Samarra is the story of one man’s courage and conviction, and the horrifying truths of one of our most trusted and honored institutions.
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| The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables by David BellosWhat it is: a thought-provoking look at the publication history and cultural impact of Victor Hugo's 1862 masterpiece Les Misérables.
Who it's for: Francophiles, fans of Victor Hugo, and readers daunted by Les Mis' staggering page count -- at under 300 pages, this accessible guide is a quick and engaging read.
Book buzz: A New York Times Editors' Choice pick, The Novel of the Century won the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2017. |
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| The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal by Howard BlumStarring: charismatic American Betty Pack, the "blonde Bond" whose efforts as an MI6 operative were crucial to an Allied victory.
Read it for: white-knuckle tales of Pack's derring-do, including securing documents that helped Alan Turing decrypt the Enigma Machine and cracking safes at the Vichy French Embassy to obtain naval codes.
Don't miss: newly declassified files. |
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| The Devil's Mercedes: The Bizarre and Disturbing Adventures of Hitler's Limousine... by Robert KlaraWhat it's about: how two Mercedes limousines with connections to Adolf Hitler wound up in postwar America, drawing headlines and fascinating onlookers for over 40 years, until an unsuspecting Canadian librarian discovered the shocking truth of their provenance.
Did you know? In 1973, one of the limos sold for $153,000.
Reviewers say: "An entertaining story of the irresistible cult of a creepy car" (Kirkus); "endlessly riveting" (Booklist). |
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| Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961 by Nicholas ReynoldsWhat it is: the intriguing, meticulously researched story of author Ernest Hemingway's affiliation with the OSS, a precursor to the CIA, and Russia's NKVD, a forerunner to the KGB.
Why you might like it: This globe-trotting adventure offers a revealing glimpse into the Pulitzer Prize winner's extracurricular exploits.
Further reading: Terry Mort's The Hemingway Patrols chronicles Hemingway's efforts to track German submarines during World War II. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Patchogue-Medford Library 54-60 East Main Street Patchogue, New York 11772 (631) 654-4700www.pmlib.org/ |
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