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The great escape: the untold story
By Ted Barris. 2014
On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty airmen crawled through a 400-foot-long tunnel, code-named "Harry," and dashed from Stalag…
Luft III, the infamous WWII German POW camp. It became known as The Great Escape. The breakout had taken a year to plan, involved 2,000 POWs, and prompted a massive manhunt across occupied Europe. All but three escapees were recaptured, and on Hitler’s orders, fifty were murdered. The author recounts this battle of wits and determination through the voices of those involved, assembles original interviews, memoirs, letters and diaries to reconstruct the Great Escape’s untold story. Bestseller. 2014.The giants of Irish literature: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (The modern scholar)
By George O'Brien. 2006
Georgetown University professor George O'Brien provides the biographical background of the four masters of Irish literature and an in-depth analysis…
of their greatest works. O'Brien discusses the very qualities that set these works apart and the "Irishness" that characterizes each of them. 2006.The generals: the Canadian army's senior commanders in the Second World War
By J. L Granatstein. 1993
Granatstein's study of life at the top during the Second World War centres on the most senior ranks in the…
Canadian Army. Men like Andrew McNaughton, Harold Crerar, Thomas Burns and Guy Simonds had not only to win military campaigns, but also command the sympathies of bureaucrats and powerful politicians. None, however, forgot they were fighting a war, and that their decisions directly affected the lives of Canadian soldiers. 1993.The girl from Leam Lane: the life and writing of Catherine Cookson
By Piers Dudgeon. 1997
Catherine Cookson's first novel, "Kate Hannigan", was published in 1950. The novel represented the author's triumph over unhappiness - within…
its pages she was exorcising her own demons. Piers Dudgeon unlocks her complex character using her many books as a key and explores with Catherine herself the tortured drama of her personal life and its resolution. 1997.The great escape
By Paul Brickhill. 2000
The Great Escape tells how more than six hundred men in a German prisoner of war camp worked together to…
achieve an extraordinary break-out. Every night for a year they dug tunnels, and those who weren't digging forged passports, drew maps, faked weapons and tailored German uniforms and civilian clothes to wear once they had escaped. All of this was conducted under the very noses of their prison guards. When the right night came, the actual escape itself was timed to the split second - but of course, not everything went according to plan... 2000.The girl in the green sweater: a life in Holocaust's shadow
By Daniel Paisner, Krystyna Chiger. 2008
In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of…
Polish Jews sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, provides a first-person account of those fourteen months with her family. Also describes Leopold Socha, a Polish Catholic and former thief, who risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food and supplies. 2009, c2008.The genius and the goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
By Jeffrey Meyers. 2009
Dual biographies of playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) and actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962). Traces the couple's disparate family backgrounds and 1956…
marriage. Describes Monroe's role as Miller's muse but posits that her psychological problems and feelings of inadequacy led to their divorce after five years. Some descriptions of sex. 2009.The fog of war: censorship of Canada's media in World War Two
By Mark Bourrie. 2011
The Canadian government censored the news during World War II for two main reasons: to keep military and economic secrets…
out of enemy hands and to prevent civilian morale from breaking down. But in those tumultuous times - with Nazi spies landing on our shores by raft, U-boat attacks in the St. Lawrence, army mutinies in British Columbia and Ontario, and pro-Hitler propaganda in the mainstream Quebec press - censors had a hard time keeping news events contained. Now, with freshly unsealed World War II press-censor files, many of the undocumented events that occurred in wartime Canada are finally revealed. c2011.The flight of the patriot: escape from revolutionary Iran
By Yadi Sharifirad. 2010
Sharifirad was shot down in the Iraqi-Iranian war in the early 1990s, saved by a group of local Kurds, and…
eventually returned to Iran where he became a national hero. The Ayatollah sent him to Pakistan as military attaché, but when he returned to Teheran, he was accused of being a CIA spy and was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. Upon his release, despite constant surveillance, he resolved to smuggle his family out of the country. Some descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. 2010.The film club: a true story of a father and son
By David Gilmour. 2007
The true story of author Gilmour's decision to let his 16-year-old son drop out of high school, on the condition…
that the boy agree to watch three films a week with him. Examines how those years changed both their lives. From French New Wave and Kurosawa to De Palma, film noir, and Billy Wilder, Gilmour describes key moments in each film, as he teaches his son about life and the vagaries of growing up through the power of the movies. Strong language and descriptions of sex. Canada Reads 2012. 2007.The forgotten dead: why 946 American servicemen died off the coast of Devon in 1944 - and the man who discovered their true story
By Ken Small, Mark Rogerson. 1993
The night of 27 April 1944: Exercise Tiger, a rehearsal for the D-Day landings, is held off Slapton Beach in…
Devon. As the mock assault is under way, 946 American servicemen die. Under wartime restrictions the story is concealed and in time forgotten, until local hotelier Ken Small finds American bullets and money while beachcombing and decides to find the truth. 1993.The flying carpet of small miracles: a woman's fight to save two orphans
By Hala Jaber. 2009
Jaber, a Lebanese-British foreign correspondent, describes covering the Gulf War and her personal engagement with an Iraqi family caught in…
the crossfire. Reporting on the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Jaber took up the cause of hospitalized children wounded in the bombing, and helped start a fund to provide them with better medical attention and supplies. In particular, she learned the extraordinary story of two orphans and decided to adopt them. Some descriptions of violence. 2009.The fighters
By C. J Chivers. 2018
Almost 2.5 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers has reported from both…
fronts from the beginning, walking side by side with combatants for more than a dozen years. He describes the experience of war today as it is endured by those most at risk-the camaraderie and profound sense of purpose, alongside courage, frustration, and moral confusion mixed with technical precision. In these remote places where the reason for their presence is sometimes not clear, these young men kill or are killed, facing palpable and often constant threat of ambush or hidden bombs. They repeatedly return, rushing toward danger, often to rescue the wounded in wars that escalate around them as the Pentagon changes doctrines and plans. Weaving a history of the war through troops' experiences, the characters in The Fighters climb into an F-14 cockpit for the opening strikes after the attacks of 9/11, hunt for Osama bin Laden along the Pakistani border, chase insurgent rocket teams with helicopters alongside American bases, face snipers in a hostile city in Anbar Province in Iraq, and engage in deadly counterguerilla warfare in the soaring mountains of the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Some suffer terribly. All are changed. They return home, uncertain of their place in the world and what their wars have achieved. 2018.The fall of Berlin 1945
By Antony Beevor. 2002
Chronicles the horror of Berlin's fall to the Soviets in 1945, recalling the starvation, exposure, artillery fire, rape, and mass…
destruction that marked the Red Army's final push on Germany's capital. 2002.The fellowship: the literary lives of the Inklings : J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
By Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski. 2015
The far side of the street
By Bruce Hutchison. 1976
This is the 1970s autobiography of the journalist and historian whose life and writing influenced many Canadians. British Columbia-raised, his…
life spanned some formative years of the province's political history. As a journalist he met and wrote about many prime ministers, and became recognized as an influential thinker. 1976.The enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
By Robertson Davies, Judith Skelton Grant. 1979
The exquisite life of Oscar Wilde: An Exquisite Life
By Stephen Calloway, David Colvin. 1997
Oscar Wilde was a central figure of the fin de siecle, and, in his own words, "a man who stood…
in symbolic relation to his times." He rose to fame in the 1880s and had the world at his feet in the 1890s. It all went wrong when following his love-affair with Lord Alfred Douglas he was persecuted by Douglas' father and sentenced to two years in jail for homosexuality. He spent the last years of his life surrounded by a handful of loyal friends in France but shunned by those who had been his followers in his days of glory. 1997.The essential gesture: writing, politics and places
By Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Clingman. 1988
This personal history of 27 years, 1959 to 1986, of Afrikaner domination in South Africa charts the response of novelist…
Nadine Gordimer to the crisis of apartheid and the struggle of the blacks to free themselves. 1988.The damned: the Canadians at the battle of Hong Kong and the POW experience, 1941-45
By Nathan M Greenfield. 2010
Fall, 1941. Almost 2,000 members of the Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenadiers were sent to bolster the British garrison at…
Hong Kong, but in the seventeen day battle for the colony following the attack on December 8, the Canadians suffered grievous losses. The second part of their story describes how the Canadians survived the horrendous conditions of Japanese POW camps. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and strong language. 2010.