Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Michigan

A Novel of the Great War

By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained—by Thea's passionate embrace of women's suffrage and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to Kezia is a book on household management—a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come. Yet when Tom enlists to fight for his country and Thea is drawn reluctantly onto the battlefield herself, the farm becomes Kezia's responsibility. Each must find a way to endure the ensuing cataclysm and turmoil. As Tom marches to the front lines and Kezia battles to keep her ordered life from unraveling, they hide their despair in letters and cards filled with stories woven to bring comfort. Even Tom's fellow soldiers in the trenches enter and find solace in the dream world of Kezia's mouth-watering, albeit imaginary, meals. But will well-intended lies and self-deception be of use when they come face-to-face with the enemy? The Care and Management of Lies paints a poignant picture of love and friendship strained by the pain of separation and the brutal chaos of battle. Ultimately, it raises profound questions about conflict, belief, and love that echo in our own time.

The Care and Management of Lies

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#hardcover #WW1 #history #juvenile #nonfiction #primarysources 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New Mexico

Authors Glenn Scherer and Marty Fletcher use letters, diaries, and other primary source documents to give the reader a more personal view of the "war to end all wars."

Primary Source Accounts of World War I

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Arkansas

In the tradition of Jennifer Robson and Hazel Gaynor, this unforgettable debut novel is a sweeping tale of forbidden love, profound loss, and the startling truth of the broken families left behind in the wake of World War I. 1921. Survivors of the Great War are desperately trying to piece together the fragments of their broken lives. While many have been reunited with their loved ones, Edie’s husband Francis is still missing. Francis is presumed to have been killed in action, but Edie knows he is alive. Harry, Francis’s brother, was there the day Francis went missing in Ypres. And like Edie, he’s hopeful Francis is living somewhere in France, lost and confused. Hired by grieving families in need of closure, Harry returns to the Western Front to photograph soldiers’ graves. As he travels through France gathering news for British wives and mothers, he searches for evidence his own brother is still alive. When Edie receives a mysterious photograph that she believes was taken by Francis, she is more certain than ever he isn’t dead. Edie embarks on her own journey in the hope of finding some trace of her husband. Is he truly gone, or could he still be alive? And if he is, why hasn’t he come home? As Harry and Edie’s paths converge, they get closer to the truth about Francis and, as they do, are soon faced with the life-changing impact of the answers they discover. An incredibly moving account of an often-forgotten moment in history—those years after the war that were filled with the unknown—The Poppy Wife tells the story of the thousands of soldiers who were lost amid the chaos and ruins in battle-scarred France; and the even greater number of men and women hoping to find them again.

The Poppy Wife

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Tennessee

Europe, 1900-1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele--but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.

In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society--as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.

From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.

Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

263574b9-ab04-41fd-972f-1f6e9121b13a-1

Nick Dybek

Washington

A Novel

Across a continent still reeling from World War I, a "ravishingly beautiful" (Paula McClain) story about a love affair between two Americans and the lie that changes everything.

France, 1921--Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is working at an ossuary in Verdun, helping priests comfort families seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past--not his rough-and-tumble Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields--can prepare Tom for the arrival of Sarah Hagen. From the moment he sees her, a young woman in a blue dress desperate for news of her missing husband, he knows he will help her in any way he can.

As their affair takes them across a fractured Europe, Tom and Sarah reckon with the ways extraordinary circumstances impact the lives of ordinary people. They eventually part but when news of an amnesiac soldier in Naples reaches Tom in Paris, he sets off, only to find Sarah there, hopeful as ever, along with an Austrian journalist named Paul who has his own agenda. Years later, a chance encounter with Paul forces Tom, now a screenwriter in Hollywood, to confront his past--and the woman he's never been able to forget.

A page-turning, vividly imagined, and deeply romantic novel about love and identity, truth and consequences, The Verdun Affair is a "literary romance...[that] unravels a love triangle and its players' secrets" (Los Angeles Times). It will transport you to another place and time while asking the question: Who are you in a world you no longer recognize?

The Verdun Affair

69267cd0-5818-4ea2-b1be-6d4e184f8178-1

Sarah Shoemaker

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

Set amid the backdrop of the massacre of Greeks and Armenians after World War I, a deeply affecting family story of love and survival infused with the rich historical detail and emotional power of Sisters of the Resistance and The Women in the Castle.

It is 1908 and Smyrna is the most cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean Sea. Though long a part of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna has always been Greek, and its citizens honor the traditions of previous generations. The Demirigis and Melopoulos families are no different, and now Liana Demirigis will wed the only Melopoulos son, Vassili--a marriage arranged by her parents.

After the wedding, Liana and Vassili build an idyllic life for themselves and their children outside of the city, safe from rising political tensions roiling the region and the world. But less than a decade later, the growing divisions between the Greeks and Turks threaten to boil over. When each country chooses a different side with the outbreak of the Great War, a hunger to reclaim Izmir consumes Greece. Suddenly Liana and her family, like thousands of others like them, are thrust into danger . . . and many will not survive.

Children of the Catastrophe is a beautifully told story that unfolds through the experiences of the Melopoulos family--their loves and quarrels, their hopes and disappointments, played out against a world on fire. Sarah Shoemaker artfully draws us into her characters' rich lives and evocatively captures all that was lost as hostilities mount and innocent men, women, and children find themselves caught up in forces beyond their control.

Children of the Catastrophe

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Cat Winters

Massachusetts

In San Diego in 1918, as influenza and World War I take their toll, Mary Shelley Black watches mourners flock to sâeances and spirit photographers for comfort and must consider if ghosts are real when her first love, killed in battle, returns.

In the Shadow of Blackbirds

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Niall Fergusson's most important book to date-a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing. From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the cold war, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances of science and economics, most people were better off than ever before-eating better, growing taller, and living longer? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900 offered the happy prospect of ever-greater interconnection. Why, then, did global progress descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics, and evolutionary theory, Niall Ferguson-one of Timemagazine's "100 Most Influential People"-masterfully examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out to explain what went wrong with modernity. On a quest that takes him from the Siberian steppe to the plains of Poland, from the streets of Sarajevo to the beaches of Okinawa, Ferguson reveals an age turned upside down by economic volatility, multicultural communities torn apart by the irregularities of boom and bust, an era poisoned by the idea of irreconcilable racial differences, and a struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new states. Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was the West. Some even talk of the American century. But for Ferguson, the biggest upshot of twentieth-century upheaval was the decline of Western dominance over Asia. A work of revelatory interpretive power, The War of the Worldis Niall Ferguson's masterwork.

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

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Armistice Day, 1918: World War I and Its Violent Climax

Re-creates November 11, 1918, the final day of World War I, when Allied military commanders in search of glory and advancement flung men against an already beaten enemy, leading to eleven thousand casualties.

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour

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Explains how key events from the year 1919 are comparable to those of today's world, documenting how such problems as terrorism, governmental repression of civil liberties, and domestic surveillance were hotly debated period issues, in an account that cites the contributions of such figures as J. Edgar Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, and W. E. B. DuBois. 4

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919

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From the author of the best-sellingA Peace to End All Peace(“extraordinarily ambitious, provocative, and vividly written”–Washington Post Book World), a dramatic reassessment of the causes of the Great War. The early summer of 1914 was the most glorious Europeans could remember. But, behind the scenes, the most destructive war the world had yet known was moving inexorably into being, a war that would continue to resonate into the twenty-first century. The question of how it began has long vexed historians. Many have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdin∧ others have concluded that it was nobody’s fault. But David Fromkin–whose account is based on the latest scholarship–provides a different answer. He makes plain that hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a gripping narrative that has eerie parallels to events in our own time, Fromkin shows that not one but two wars were waged, and that the first served as pretext for the second. Shedding light on such current issues as preemptive war and terrorism, he provides detailed descriptions of the negotiations and incisive portraits of the diplomats, generals, and rulers–the Kaiser of Germany, the Czar of Russia, the Prime Minister of England, among other key players. And he reveals how and why diplomacy was doomed to fail.

Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?

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The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924

The gripping story of the years that ended the Great War and launched Europe and America onto the roller coaster of the twentieth century, Crucible is filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, and the absurdities of chance


In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.


Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal--these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Revolutions and civil wars erupt across Europe. A red scare hits America. Women win the vote. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. The real becomes surreal.


Encompassing both tragedy and humor, the celebrated author of 1913 brings immediacy and intimacy to this moment of deep historical transformation that molded the world we would come to inherit.

Crucible

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#hardcover  #history #ww1 #1914 #worldwar1

A history of the Great War explores the causes and consequences of this global conflict, while tracing its continual reverberations throughout world history almost a century later.

The First World War

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The Escape of the Goeben to the Dardenelles in 1914

The Ship That Changed the World

b95258b4-5318-43e6-9fac-8cb98821f30c-1

Daniel Mason

A Washington Post Best Book of 2018A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2018An NPR Great Read of 2018 National Bestseller "The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." --Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review "A dream of a novel... Part mystery, part war story, part romance." --Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone.

The Winter Soldier

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Louisiana

A Love Story That Broke Barriers

In a memoir set on the eve of World War I, the author describes growing up in a working-class town in northern England, where Jews and Christians were strictly divided, and how his sister's love for a Christian boy broke down the invisible social barrier.

The Invisible Wall

a7512f10-8332-4118-96bc-4ce67842d6ec-1

#hardcover #history #ww1 #1914 #worldwar1 #war

The standard account of World War I says that the war happened because politicians lost control of events, and that once the war began, it quickly became an unstoppable machine. But in this major new work, historian David Stevenson shows that politicians deliberately took risks that led to war in July 1914, and that battle by bloody battle, their decision remained to continue the fighting. Cataclysm presents the disturbing reality that the course of the war was the result of conscious choices--including the continued acceptance of astronomical casualties.Rather than the standard Germany-vs.-England account, Cataclysm is a truly international history, drawing on previously undisclosed records from the Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Ottoman governments. From the complex network of secret treaties and alliances that eventually drew all of Europe into the war, to the way that World War I reconfigured how societies mourn and memorialize wartime dead, Cataclysm is a major revision of World War I history.

Cataclysm - The First World War As Political Tragedy

0a5a185b-9e03-4ae7-a164-f525307649a1-1

Pennsylvania

Last House Before The Mountain - ARC

April Smith

#fiction #historicalfiction #ww1 #fallensoldiers #grief #france

Texas

The United States Congress in 1929 passed legislation to fund travel for mothers of the fallen soldiers of World War I to visit their sons' graves in France. Over the next three years, 6,693 Gold Star Mothers made the trip. In this emotionally charged, brilliantly realized novel, April Smith breathes life into a unique moment in American history, imagining the experience of five of these women.

They are strangers at the start, but their lives will become inextricably intertwined, altered in indelible ways. These very different Gold Star Mothers travel to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery to say final good-byes to their sons and come together along the way to face the unexpected: a death, a scandal, and a secret revealed. 

None of these pilgrims will be as affected as Cora Blake, who has lived almost her entire life in a small fishing village off the coast of Maine, caring for her late sister's three daughters, hoping to fill the void left by the death of her son, Sammy, who was killed on a scouting mission during the final days of the war. Cora believes she is managing as well as can be expected in the midst of the Depression, but nothing has prepared her for what lies ahead on this unpredictable journey, including an extraordinary encounter with an expatriate American journalist, Griffin Reed, who was wounded in the trenches and hides behind a metal mask, one of hundreds of "tin noses" who became symbols of the war.  

With expert storytelling, memorable characters, and beautiful prose, April Smith gives us a timeless story, by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, set against a footnote of history--little known, yet unforgettable.

A Star for Mrs. Blake

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Illinois

All Quiet on the Western Front

Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.

Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.

For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm

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Americans in World War I

The political history of the American experience in World War I is a story of conflict and bungled intentions that begins in an era dedicated to progressive social reform and ends in the Red Scare and Prohibition. Thomas Fleming tells this story through the complex figure of Woodrow Wilson, the contradictory president who wept after declaring war, devastated because he knew it would destroy the tolerance of the American people, but who then suppressed freedom of speech and used propaganda to excite America into a Hun-hating mob. This is tragic history: inexperienced American military leaders drove their troops into gruesome slaughters; progressive politics were put on hold in America; an idealistic president's dreams were crushed because of his own negligence. Wilson's inability to convince Congress to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations was one of the most poignant failures in the history of the American presidency, but even more heartrending were Wilson's concessions to his bitter allies in the Treaty of Versailles. In exchange for Allied support of the League of Nations, he allowed an unfair peace treaty to be signed, a treaty that played no small role in the rise of National Socialism and the outbreak of World War II. Thomas Fleming has once again created a masterpiece of narrative American history. This incomparable portrait shows how Wilson sacrificed his noble vision to megalomania and single-mindedness, while paying homage to him as a visionary whose honorable spirit continues to influence Western politics.

The Illusion of Victory

8c65424a-4832-4974-a02e-ad00642a36d6-1

#hardcover #history #militaryhistory #ww2 #wwii #ww1 #wwi

Ohio

Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the World They Forged

Now in paperback, from national bestselling author and acclaimed military historian Robert L. O'Connell, a dynamic history of four military leaders whose extraordinary leadership and strategy led the United States to success during World War I and beyond.

By the first half of the twentieth century, technology had transformed warfare into a series of intense bloodbaths in which the line between soldiers and civilians was obliterated, resulting in the deaths of one hundred million people. During this period, four men exhibited unparalleled military leadership that led the United States victoriously through two World Wars: Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, George Marshall, and Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower; or, as bestselling author Robert O'Connell calls them, Team America.

O'Connell captures these men's unique charisma as he chronicles the path each forged--from their upbringings to their educational experiences to their storied military careers--experiences that shaped them into majestic leaders who would play major roles in saving the free world and preserving the security of the United States in times of unparalleled danger. O'Connell shows how the lives of these men--all born within the span of a decade--twisted around each other like a giant braid in time. Throughout their careers, they would use each other brilliantly in a series of symbiotic relationships that would hold increasingly greater consequences.

At the end of their star-studded careers (twenty-four out of a possible twenty-five), O'Connell concludes that what set Team America apart was not their ability to wield the proverbial sword, but rather their ability to plot strategy, give orders, and inspire others. The key ingredients to their success was mental agility, a gravitas that masked their intensity, and an almost intuitive understanding of how armies in the millions actually functioned and fought. Without the leadership of these men, O'Connell makes clear, the world we know would be vastly different.

Save this search

Jacqueline Winspear

The Care and Management of Lies

Glenn Scherer; Marty Fletcher

Primary Source Accounts of World War I

Caroline Scott

The Poppy Wife

Philipp Blom

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914

Nick Dybek

The Verdun Affair

Sarah Shoemaker

Children of the Catastrophe

Cat Winters

In the Shadow of Blackbirds

Niall Ferguson

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West

Joseph E. Persico

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour

Ann Hagedorn

Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America 1919

David Fromkin

Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?

Charles Emmerson

Crucible

Hew Strachan

The First World War

Dan Van der Vat

The Ship That Changed the World

Daniel Mason

The Winter Soldier

Harry Bernstein

The Invisible Wall

David Stevenson

Cataclysm - The First World War As Political Tragedy

Monika Helfer

Last House Before The Mountain - ARC

April Smith

A Star for Mrs. Blake

Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front

Miranda Carter

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm

Thomas Fleming

The Illusion of Victory

Robert L. O'Connell

Team America

Ernest K Gann

In the Company of Eagles