Akron Public Library

She possessed a stunning beauty. She also possessed a stunning mind. Could the world handle both?Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her...

Hiroshima is the story of six people--a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest--who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize-winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through...

"Michael Ondaatje's three previous novels have each been met with the highest praise: for their startling narrative inventiveness, the richness of their imagery and emotion, and the spellbinding quality of their language. When In the Skin of a Lion was published in 1987, Carolyn Kizer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called Ondaatje "a beautiful writer... brilliantly gifted." And Tom Clark wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that "Ondaatje...

"It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of...

History of life as it was lived during the Depression and Wold War II comes alive and is preserved in people's own words. Photographs and time lines also commemorate important dates and events. Starting with the Depression and Pearl Harbor, moving on through the war years in Europe, in the Pacific, and at home, this unique books preserves a people's rich historical heritage.

Ahead of the German Blitz during World War II, English parents from every social class sent their children to the countryside for safety, displacing more than three million young offspring. In The Secret Guests, the British royal family takes this evacuation a step further, secretly moving the princesses to the estate of the Duke of Edenmore in "neutral" Ireland. A female English secret agent, Miss Celia Nashe, and a young Irish detective, Garda Strafford,...

In 1943 ten-year-old Lida is torn away from her home in the Ukraine, separated from her little sister Larissa, and sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, but when she is moved and set to making bombs she sees a way to strike back at the Nazis.

A series of events aboard a U.S. destroyer during World War II culminate in an alleged mutiny, which leads to a court martial. Misery begins when a paranoid commander, Captain Queeg takes charge. In a matter of days he has alienated everybody -- & all on board believe Queeg to be insane. In a tense situation during a critical period of the war, Queeg loses all self-control. In the better interest of the ship & the nation, the second-in-command, Lieutenant...

These stories take place in a variety of locales. They are stories of people living under conditions similar to the way they might have lived on the frontier.