Frank Carlson Library

Abandoning her abusive fiancé in New York in 1943 to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe, Irene Woodward befriends Dorothy Dunford as they join the Allied soldiers streaming into France after D-Day where they are embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald, and where Irene learns to trust again through their friendship. In 1943. Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York and heads to Europe...

In war-torn France, Jo McMahon, an Italian-Irish girl from the tenements of Brooklyn, tends to six seriously wounded soldiers in a makeshift medical unit. Enemy bombs have destroyed her hospital convoy, and now Jo singlehandedly struggles to keep her patients and herself alive in a cramped and freezing tent close to German troops. There is a growing tenderness between her and one of her patients, a Scottish officer, but Jo's heart is seared by the...

H.G. Wells' "scientific romance," published first in serial form and then as a book in 1898, attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast "Invasion from Mars" by Orson Welles. It was also made into an early 1950s science fiction adventure movie. Stover (emeritus, Illinois Institute of Technology) describes Wells' story as "a prophecy of startling originality foreseeing the coming of totalitarianism...

"August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler's forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she'd wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London. Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling...

Her beauty saved her - and condemned her. Cilka is just 16-years-old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping...

Wealthy, beautiful Naneé was born with a spirit of adventure that transcends her Midwestern roots. When German tanks roll across the border and into Paris, Nanée joins the resistance. Known as the Postmistress because she delivers information to those in hiding, Naneé uses her charms and skill to house the hunted and deliver them to safety. Inspired by the real life Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who worked with American journalist Varian Fry...

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with...

"Fenna Vos has learned to focus on her own surviva-l-even now, with the Second World War raging in faraway countries. She works on-stage as the assistant to an unruly escape artist--behind the curtain as the mastermind of their act. After all, her honed ability to control her surroundings and elude entrapments, physical or otherwise, reliably suppresses the trauma and tragedy of her youth. For all her calculations, however, Fenna neglects to foresee...

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This book, John Hersey's journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic "that stirs the conscience of humanity" (The New York Times). Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima...

Will, who has become a protector of his first fief after many years as a Ranger's apprentice, is faced with many challenges when Keren, a renegade knight, takes over Castle Macindaw and forges a secret alliance with Scotti.