Frank Carlson Library

Soon after the start of hostilities in Iraq, Rome-based, love-struck poet and lecturer Attilio heads to Baghdad when he learns from his friend, an Iraqi poet, that the woman he loves has been critically injured in a bomb explosion. Attilio does everything in his power to save her, risking his own life amidst the chaos of war.

In northern Australia at the beginning of World War II, an English aristocrat inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier....

In the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC, an alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian army in the mountain pass of Thermopylae. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the enemy in one of the most famous last stands of history. Persian King Xerxes lead an Army of well over 100,000 men to Greece and was confronted by 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians and other Slave soldiers. Xerxes waited many days for King Leonidas to surrender or withdraw....

Set in Poland during World War II. Innocent and naive 8-year-old Bruno is bored and restless in his new home. Ignoring his mother, he sets off on an adventure in the woods. He comes across a high fence which separates him from the people he can see through it. Soon he meets a young boy in striped pajamas, and a surprising friendship develops.

The story of Alexander the Great, who in 4th century BC conquered ninety percent of the known world of the time by defeating Greece, Persia, Afghanistan, and India in just eight years.

During WWII two pilots, one American and one Japanese, crash on a small uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean. There, they must let go of their hostility and cooperate in order to survive, but will they?

Follows "Swoff," a third-generation Marine enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through the Middle East deserts. There is no cover from intolerable heat or from the Iraqi soldiers, who are always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they...

The story of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman that were forever immortalized as a symbol of WWII by raising the American flag at the battle of Iwo Jima. When Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the event becomes a symbol of hope for the families at home, the three surviving men are pulled from combat and sent on a tour across America to raise desperately-needed bond money. It is a trip that brings out the truths of both that symbolic act, and their...

A young army private refuses to let his fellow soldiers and commanding sergeant get away with the rape and murder of a native woman.

Set against the backdrop of civil war and chaos in 1990's Sierra Leone, Blood Diamond is the story of Danny Archer - an ex mercenary from Zimbabwe - and Solomon Vandy - a Mende fisherman. Both men are African, but their histories as different as any can be, until their fates become joined in a common quest to recover a rare pink diamond that can transform their lives. While in jail for smuggling, Archer learns that Solomon - who was taken from his...