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Sarah Rose's D-Day Girls not only lets you understand what life was like in occupied France for four long years during World War II but also lets us understand the contributions that women made to overthrow the Nazi menace.
It's a true story, drawn from recently declassified files, diaries, and oral histories, that follows the challenges women faced as French saboteurs. Trained in England, the one European country left to counter Hitler's plans for conquest, the women learned how to shoot and handle explosives while keeping a low profile to avoid capture--and probable torture.
Rose explained that, while writing the book, she realized that the real end to her story arrived not with the end of the war in Europe but with D-Day, the successful Allied invasion that came 11 months earlier.
French resistance workers, suffering under German rule for years, came alive with the invasion, actively blowing up train and power lines to thwart Nazi forces bent on repelling the invaders.
But laying the groundwork for that resistance effort required a heroic effort by men--and women--whose every move was being scrutinized by a regime that Rose described as "a citadel of hate."
Fourteen of the 39 women trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive, the secret agency that became known simply as the firm, died in the war. Others sustained horrific injuries but, despite so many problems, they succeeded.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Rose also talks about the role of the BBC during the war, not just providing information but conveying code words to spy operatives in Europe.
 

An experienced auctioneer is in a good position to shed light on the human condition. After all, they're up there in front of a crowd, dealing with both buyers and sellers, as well as spending a lot of time evaluating the bric a brac we all love to collect.
So it is with Bob Brunk who spent 35 years as an auctioneer in Asheville, N.C. Brunk's collection of essays, A Question of Value, shares some of his experiences auctioning off everything from glass eyeballs to telescopes.
Some of the characters in the collection include the 90-year-old woman who was divesting herself of her earthly possessions, some going to family members, other things going to auction. "I just want to come out even," she tells Brunk.
There's Robert Young, the fiery little auctioneer who negotiated only one way--his way. Brunk recalls being in Young's shop when a woman offered Young $1,800 for an item that was priced at $2,200. He informed her that the price was as marked but if she asked again, the cost would be $3,500. "Naturally, she hurried out of the store," said Brunk, whose own auctioneering approach was less confrontational.
"I went to auction school where they teach you the chant but I found that what worked best for me was to be clear about what the bid was and what I was asking," he said.
Like everything else, the auction business and the selling of antiques has seen plenty of change over the years, said Brunk.
"When I started here in Asheville in the 1980s there were 14 or 15 antique stores. Now there's just one," he said. The number of auctioneers has also dwindled, noted Brunk, pointing out that some of the things that people collected in the past--such as pewter dinnerware, Hummels, and pressed glass--don't have the same value today. 
Just because something gets older doesn't always make it more valuable, he added.
The internet has also brought change to the business of buying and selling items, said Brunk, recalling a regular buyer who told him he was no longer going to come to auctions because the internet opened the field to "the whole world." When that same individual had a collection to sell, however, he asked Brunk if he was still involved with "that internet thing." 

Deciding on “the best player you've never heard of” is a baseball pastime sure to involve arguments just as fruitless as those demanding a particular batter or pitcher be included in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

But Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, baseball historians whose previous publications have delved deeply into baseball’s early days, the so-called Dead Ball Era, make a convincing case for Mike Donlin, “a rough and rowdy” baseball player who became an idol in New York before Babe Ruth arrived on the scene.

Their book, Mike Donlin, covers the career of the man Damon Runyon said was the most colorful player he ever saw as well as Donlin’s second career, on the stage and in the movies.

Born in Peoria, Donlin is now all but forgotten but played with some of the greats, players like Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Tris Speaker, and John McGraw. In 12 seasons, Donlin batted over .330, earning a reputation both as a dynamic hitter and one of baseball’s bad boys, tormenting umpires and managers alike.

A heavy drinker, Donlin got into scrapes more serious than the occasional bar fight or on-field skirmish. He did prison time and was suspended from pro ball for a year after being found guilty of assaulting a woman in 1902. But he was back playing baseball for the Cincinnati Reds in 1903, a year when he batted .351, second only to Honus Wagner’s .355.

Steinberg said that Donlin’s celebrity status blossomed as a member of the New York Giants, one of several teams he played for. Managed by McGraw, the Giants won the World Series in 1905. 

But the Donlin book also has a romantic side, offering a portion of the article James Hopper wrote for Collier’s magazine in 1908: “Two years ago Big Mike Donlin was a reckless, violent, husky-voiced, swaggering brawler. Then he met Mabel Hite, who, discerning a chance for that redemption which woman so dearly loves, gently led him to the altar. Mike Donlin now is a …lithe, clean-hewed, supple athlete; his features made firm through physical and moral health, have regained lines almost classical.”    

As the most prominent vaudeville actress in the country at the time, Mabel Hite was just what the doctor needed when it came to taming the wild Donlin. The team of Hite and Donlin was a vaudeville hit with crowds and critics alike, said Steinberg. “If you miss him (Donlin), you do yourself an injustice,” said a reviewer at Variety magazine. 

But the marriage and her theatrical career were cut short when Hite died of cancer in 1912 at the age of 29. Trained by his wife, Donlin gravitated to the stage. His last baseball season ended in an unsuccessful comeback attempt in 1914 but he married actress Rita Ross and moved to Hollywood where he became a drinking buddy of actors John Barrymore and Buster Keaton. Among the 100 movies he appeared in, mostly in small parts, was the role of a Union general in Keaton’s The General, considered one of the comedian’s greatest films.

Donlin died in 1933, remembered more as a likable actor than the brawling ballplayer “He was something of a headache but more often a joy to me, and player…a fighter, the kind that used to make for winning teams in the days I played the game,” said former manager McGraw who also recalled humorist Will Rogers telling him of his fondness for Donlin. 

World War II may have ended nearly 80 years ago but it lives on as a subject endlessly reviewed with fresh insight and information supplied on an ongoing basis. 

Movies and books haven’t stopped rehashing the great war since its conclusion, witness last year’s Oppenheimer and, now playing in your local metroplex, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Meanwhile, WWII offers an ongoing avalanche of literary material, exemplified by recent titles like Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, WWII’s Invisible Secret Weapon, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, and Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence.

WWII was so vast and so involving, that it may be another 80 years before we stop writing books about it. There are always aspects to explore, examining the men and women who put their bodies on the line, sometimes in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Who isn’t interested in tales of that kind of heroism? 

Caroline Alexander’s Skies of Thunder (Viking Press) examines the WWII heroes who flew transport planes in the China-Burma-India theater. During these times of rising tensions between China and the U.S., it’s worth noting that the two countries were allies in WWII.

Japan had attacked China years before Pearl Harbor and, by 1942, had all but sealed China off from the world. Alexander notes that the official line at the time was that America wanted to keep China in the war. The U.S. military didn’t want Japanese troops engaged in China to be diverted elsewhere in the Pacific.

Alexander said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was also thinking about global politics after the war. Assisting the most populous country in the world—that wouldn’t declare an allegiance to Communism until 1949--could only bolster U.S. prospects.

Once Japan closed Chinese ports and gained control of the Burma Road, the only way to get supplies into China was by air. There was only one little problem: the air route required flying over the foothills of the Himalayas. As if navigating through the tallest mountain range in the world wasn’t daunting enough, pilots had to deal with frequent, intense storms over those mountains, the result of warm air from the Bay of Bengal colliding with cold winds from Siberia, said Alexander.

Storms proved to pose an even greater danger than enemy planes at a time when the existence of a weather phenomenon known as the jet stream wasn’t even known, said Alexander. “Pilots sometimes reported being shot up thousands of feet in a minute as they endeavored to fly by instruments,” she said. Flights were scheduled around the clock regardless of the weather. 

The stormy weather proved to be a major obstacle, claiming 600 planes and 1,700 lives. Little wonder that flying the Hump also became known as traversing the Aluminum Trail. 

Alexander said she first became aware of the airlift while undertaking an assignment for National Geographic on the large tiger refuge in Myanmar (Burma’s present name). After noticing that strange, jagged pieces of metal fencing of villagers’ gardens were made from pieces of fuselage from old WWII planes, she learned that the lush jungle was hiding a graveyard of crashed cargo planes.

Alexander also includes information on how Americans supported China on the ground, carving out the Ledo Road, a route between India and China that required “a Herculean engineering project in challenging terrain and climate,” noted Matthew Delmont in Half American, a book about the contributions African Americans made during WWII.

The Ledo Road stood as a remarkable achievement, involving 15,000 American troops, almost two-thirds of them African American, along with 35,000 local Indian, Burmese, and Chinese civilian workers. It took a lot of heavy equipment to

"If you keep up with the headlines, you know computers are taking our jobs. Spying on us. Controlling what we buy and who we vote for. Even discriminating against us. When they're done beating us at our own pastimes, maybe they'll rise up and kill us. Our relationship with these machines has become, not to put a fine point on it, dysfunctional."
That's how Michael Littman starts Code to Joy, his book that suggests everybody should learn a little about programming.
People don't need to learn how to be coders but we'd benefit if we found out a few things in order to let the computer work for us, he said.
Littman said artificial intelligence can aid in the simplification of computer programming. It's a good match, regardless, he said. "We come prewired to teach. Computers come prewired to learn."
Littman, a computer science professor at Brown University, would like to see us go from a world where only professionals program to one where nearly everyone programs.
Littman sees positive results already. "Customizable questionnaires, web pages, and video games are out there now that allow people to write small amounts of code and get large benefits in terms of tailoring the computer's behavior to their goals," he noted.
"Word processors and spreadsheets provide scripting languages and macros that let you streamline your workflow. Entities like Google and Amazon are privately talking about giving people more control over how recommendations are made on their behalf, making it less about the machine reading our passive intentions and more about you asserting your will," stated Littman. 

Climate change needs no introduction for most of us. Or does it? How do we confront it without being overwhelmed by the prospects of a planet in disarray?
In his book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage, Rob Verchick seeks to tamp down the fear and loathing that goes with the subject and build up a plan of action, a call for climate resilience.
"The world we inhabit is getting hotter, drier, wetter, and weirder," notes Verchick. "Our coastlands are sinking. Forests are bursting into flame. Droughts and heat waves are getting worse," he adds.
"On top of this comes another dose of hard reality: As a matter of physics, global warming cannot be reversed very quickly," Verchick stated.
So what's to be done? "Today climate action takes two distinct priorities: curbing greenhouse gases to fend off worst-case consequences and boosting community resilience to cope with the impacts already mounting," he said.
Getting real is what's being called for. "I believe that climate resilience is the gateway discussion toward broader climate action, including eliminating fossil fuels," noted Verchick, who hosts his own podcast, Connect the Dots, talked to Steve Tarter about a woman he interviewed in Octopus who seeks to improve worker safety in Nevada where presently there are few protections for those working outside, often in 100-degree heat.
While that may not seem like working on climate change, it's a start, he said.
In his Read Beat interview, Verchick discusses an approach for the average citizen in this overheated world while exploring the problems of Joshua Trees, coral reefs and those discarded refrigerators that were left behind after Hurricane Katrina.
 

Nick Medina’s Indian Burial Ground  is a horror novel that combines stirring storytelling with an exploration of historical racial injustices in America – in this case, the epidemic of alcoholism, suicide, and mental health disorders on Indigenous reservations.
Medina’s sophomore novel again sheds light on issues affecting Native communities, while also delivering a genuinely terrifying and engaging read.
Already at work on a third book in the same horror/Native American vein, Medina told Steve Tarter that his hope is to enlighten readers who might not comprehend some of the problems modern Native Americans face.
Medina, an admitted true-crime TV fan, made his debut in 2023 with Sisters of the Lost Nation, a book which addressed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Burial Ground is centered around a woman and her uncle as they are haunted by a string of deaths—decades apart—in their Louisiana reservation.
 

William McKinley was assassinated before completing his first term of office as U.S. president in 1901 "after leading the nation to victory in the Spanish-American War," noted the White House Historical Association.
That's the war perhaps best known for the slogan, "Remember the Maine," the U.S. war cry over the battleship sunk in Cuba, an incident that reportedly set off the conflict. But Taina Caragol wants you to know that there's a lot more to the story.
In 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific, Caragol and co-editor Kate Clarke Lemay outline changes that took place that year as the U.S. claimed sovereignity over Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam and temporarily occupied Cuba. That was also the year that the United States annexed Hawaii as a territory.
The 1898 book also serves as a catalog for an exhibition-- held at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. for 10 months through February 2024.
That exhibition added pictures and text to what happened in those countries beyond what the gallery already had in place: the lauding of  Theodore Roosevelt and George Dewey as war heroes.
Caragol told Steve Tarter that noted historians Kristin Hoganson, Healoha Johnston, Jorge Duany, Theodore Gonzalves, Neil Weare and Paul Kramer all contributed to 1898.
What you get in 1898, along with graphics you might expect from a display at the National Portrait Gallery, is a picture of U.S. empire-building, taking over Spanish colonies and asserting their own needs ahead of the people living in Cuba and the Philippines, countries that had been fighting their own wars of independence for years. 
In the case of Hawaii, five years before formally annexing the island nation, the United States helped overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy that ruled the country.
Such U.S.  involvement in the affairs of other countries drew criticism from Americans like W.E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams and Mark Twain, the book noted.
"This isn't who we are (as a nation)," Twain complained at the time, said Caragol. 

 

In a presidential election year, eyes turn toward the many distinct groups that make up the electorate. So what's up with the rural voter? It's a group that voted Republican by a margin of 70 to 80 percent over their Democratic rivals in many rural communities, noted Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea, the authors of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.
While the GOP advantage among rural voters may have been 60 percent several decades ago, a steep divide between city and country voters began as far back as 1980, said Shea.
Along with studying voting patterns over the years, the two professors at Colby College in Maine conducted what they consider the largest single study of the rural voter, surveying 10,000 rural voters across the country, said Jacobs.
Rural voters tend to think that place is important, he said. What pushes so many away from the Democrats is the feeling that rural values have been neglected by that party.
Another point that Jacobs and Shea make in their book is the problem that rural residents now face in getting information, particularly about local politics. The demise of so many small-town newspapers in recent years means less local rural news. That means more get their news from television where the focus is on national issues.
Jacobs and Shea don't think major media outlets have done a very good job in portraying rural America, often succumbing to "rural rabble-rousers," focusing on outgoing individuals who want to be interviewed, thereby diverting attention from more mainstream rural attitudes.
That leads to a widening in the gulf between urban and rural, said Shea. When the media focus is on the rabble-rouser, the urban viewer/reader is likely to think  "They're all lunatics out there" (in rural America), he said.
Survey results also pointed to a misconception that rural residents are stuck where they are, that they've struggled to leave but failed. "These are not the wastelands of alienation that people want to leave. They don't want to move. They want to stay where they are," said Shea.
 

Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the iconic figures of the Old West but did you know his Wild West show often involved a cast of 1,500 people who had to be fed and transported from town to town? Or that Cody dined with presidents and royalty?
Those are just some of the things you learn in Steve Friesen's book, Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill.
Yes, Cody was an accomplished scout and hunter who lived in the era when the West was still relatively wild. Friesen describes Cody's Civil War experience as generally undistinguished but during the conflict, he did meet up with Wild Bill Hickok then serving as a Union spy.
After the war, Cody served as a scout and earned his name as a buffalo hunter at a time when herds were still abundant, Friesen points out.
The 1870s was the era of the dime novel and Western characters like Cody found fame with their rifles and buckskin. When Cody went east he was urged to to take the Buffalo Bill persona to the stage. One thing led to another, Friesen told Steve Tarter, and Cody got the show biz bug.
Those shows got bigger and bigger with Cody insisting on authenticity. "Even as the West he knew disappeared, he would live it on a daily basis," noted Friesen.
One of the main features of the book is exploring the fact that Cody liked to eat and eat well. While the author notes how much Buffalo Bill enjoyed New York's Delmonico's, Nashville's Maxwell House (before they started serving coffee there) or the DeWitt Hotel in Lewiston, Me., he didn't dine alone.
Cody and a team that included ace promoter Arizona John Burke made sure that the cast of Native Americans (primarily members of the Lakota nation), cowboys, and stagehands ate well when they were on the road. 
It didn't matter if it was a one-night stand or a six-month stint such as the fabulously successful run in 1893 at Chicago's Columbian Exposition where Cody and his troops entertained 20,000 people twice a day every day for six months while crowds flooded to see White City. 
"When people got off the train in Chicago, they could go left to the exposition or right to the Wild West show," said Friesen.
The Chicago engagement made a millionaire out of Cody who ran his Wild West shows all over the world for 30 years, said Friesen. Buffalo Bill not only had an impact on how we view the West in this country but in Europe where the Wild West show toured for years, he said.