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Look What's in Large Print: September 2017

"History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how people felt."-- Guy Vanderhaeghe (1951- )

Cold Mountain [large print] by Charles Frazier

Inman, an injured and disillusioned Confederate soldier, embarks on a harrowing journey home to his sweetheart, Ada, who herself is struggling to run the farm left her at her father's sudden death.

Street boys [large print] by Lorenzo Carcaterra

Naples, Italy, during four fateful days in the fall of 1943. The only people left in the shattered, bombed-out city are the lost, abandoned children whose only goal is to survive another day. None could imagine that they would become fearless fighters and the unlikeliest heroes of World War II. 

A fictional account of the struggle for Okinawa through the eyes of combatants on both sides-- Private Clay Adams, Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., and General Mitsura Ushijima, the Japanese general in charge of defending the island.

 Jennifer Chiaverini, reveals the famous First Lady's very public social and political contest with Kate Chase Sprague, memorialized as "one of the most remarkable women ever known to Washington society." ("Providence Journal") Kate Chase Sprague was born in 1840 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second daughter to the second wife of a devout but ambitious lawyer. Her father, Salmon P. Chase, rose to prominence in the antebellum years and was appointed secretary of the treasury in Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, while aspiring to even greater heights. Beautiful, intelligent, regal, and entrancing, young Kate Chase stepped into the role of establishing her thrice-widowed father in Washington society and as a future presidential candidate. Her efforts were successful enough that "The Washington Star" declared her "the most brilliant woman of her day. None outshone her." None, that is, but Mary Todd Lincoln. 

Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating wealth into the Eighties.