World War II

 

If you enjoyed reading about Molly McIntire, the American Girl character from Illinois in 1944, and her adventures at summer camp, you might enjoy these other books about camping, World War II, and other fun topics.

Fiction

Secrets from the sleeping bag by Rose (Barbara Rose) Cooper

During four weeks of summer camp Sofia Becker writes all the juciest information in her notebook, so she can continue her blog when she returns home.

 

If you enjoyed reading about Nanea Mitchell, the American Girl character from Honolulu in 1941, you might be interested in some of these titles about Hawaii, WWII, kids looking to do good, and more.

Fiction

A new arrival by Anna Alter
Also available in: e-book

The animals who live in the apartment building on Sprout Street have a new neighbor, Mili, who just moved in from Hawaii.

The Canton Seniors Book Group meets on the fourth Thursday of every month (except December) from 2:00-3:00 PM. No registration required.  The December meeting is used to share favorite titles and make suggestions for the coming year. Join us in this open, no-registration-required conversation.

January 25, 2018

The red tent by Anita Diamant
Also available in: audiobook | video

The story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is told from her point of view, beginning with the story of her mothers, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. These wives of Jacob give her the gifts that are to sustain her through a damaged youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land.

Canton Seniors Book Discussion: April 26, 2018

Wolf's Mouth by John Smolens
Also available in: e-book

In 1944, Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula. By 1956 they have become Frank and Claire Green, a young married couple building a new life in postwar Detroit. When INS agent James Giannopoulos tracks them down, Frank learns that Vogel is executing men like Frank for their wartime transgressions. As a series of brutal murders rivets Detroit, Frank is caught between American justice and Nazi vengeance. In Wolf 's Mouth, the recollections of Francesco Verdi/Frank Green give voice to the hopes, fears, and hard choices of a survivor as he strives to escape the ghosts of history.

Upcoming sessions

There are no upcoming sessions available.

Canton Seniors Book Discussion: March 22, 2018

The women in the castle by Jessica Shattuck
Also available in: e-book | audiobook | e-audiobook

02Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold, are the focus of this riveting novel. Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, this is a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding.  

Upcoming sessions

There are no upcoming sessions available.

"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. 

Scrapper by Matt Bell

For fans of The Dog Stars and Station Eleven , Scrapper traces one man's desperate quest for redemption in a devastated Detroit. "Has the feel of Cormac McCarthy's The Road set in present-day Motor City... powerful." -- Publishers Weekly Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as "the zone," an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he's come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy's unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas. The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods , Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America's greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we've committed to protect the people we love?

A motorcycle stunt rider turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his lover and their newborn child, a decision that puts him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective.

We currently have over 3500 large print books in our Adult collection to choose from with new titles being added throughout the year. From the classics to the cult favorites, our selection spans fiction and nonfiction across all genres.  This month we are spotlighting recently published Mystery selections.

When a Hollywood actress buys an old mansion in Haven Harbor, Maine, she hires Angie Curtis to appraise the estate's sizable collection of needlepoint pictures. But the more Angie examines the pieces, the more they seem to point toward a twenty-five-year-old murder--and the murderer.

Amy-Faye Johnson's book club, the Readaholics, is engrossed in Murder on the Orient Express, and Poirot's surprising resolution is stirring up debate. Is the solution remotely realistic? Is justice served? Well, it's fiction after all. Then, just as Amy-Faye is planning the grand opening of her brother Derek's pub, his hot-headed partner is murdered. To keep Derek from being railroaded as a suspect, Amy-Faye and the Readaholics take a page from Poirot and investigate. But the clues lead to unlikely places and surprising motives ...

Looking for a good mystery and a way to earn the Connect Your Summer 2016 Super Bookworm: My Mitten badge?  Check out this selection of mysteries set in Michigan.

The 10th installment of the beloved Woods Cop Mystery series! The traditional firearm deer season in Michigan lasts two weeks, a time in which the most hunters are afield during the year and the time when most things happen. Game wardens cannot count on having any life but work during this period, and in this case Grady Service, who takes longtime violator and archrival Limpy Allerdyce on as his partner for deer season runs into the most bizarre string of big cases involving deer that he has ever encountered. Buckular Dystrophy is the term coined by Conservation Officers to describe the condition whereby people cannot help killing deer, not for sport or food, but for other reasons - an addiction of sorts, and unlike other addictions, one not medically organized, but just as real.
 

Tracking the beast by Henry Kisor

When the remains of three little girls turn up inside railroad hopper cars, Sheriff Steve Martinez faces a troublesome case, for the cars had sat for years on a siding deep inside his beloved Porcupine County. After Steve and his comrades do the spadework, the FBI moves in, thinking their Unsub is both rapist and murderer. But Steve believes the killer--or killers--instead hired someone to dispose of the bodies. With the help of lawmen of all kinds, including the Ontario Provincial Police, and even Detroit mobsters, Steve doggedly tracks "the Beast." This intricate police procedural, set in the wilds of Upper Michigan, features not only an exciting high-tech chase around Lake Superior but also the revival of a clever World War II deception.

I spy.  This month the focus is on espionage, real and fictional.

From the bestselling author of Istanbul Passage--called a "fast-moving thinking man's thriller" by The Wall Street Journal--comes a sweeping, atmospheric novel of postwar East Berlin, a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Berlin 1948. Almost four years after the war's end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment--to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? Betrayal? Survival? Murder? Filled with intrigue, and the moral ambiguity of conflicted loyalties, Joseph Kanon's new novel is a compelling thriller and a love story that brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life.

"Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers. The war is over. Bernie Gunther, our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer, is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956 and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens, a local writer needs just that, someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham. And it turns out it is not just a bridge partner that he needs; it's some professional advice. Maugham is being blackmailed--perhaps because of his unorthodox lifestyle. Or perhaps because of something in his past, because once upon a time, Maugham worked for the British secret service, and the people now blackmailing him are spies."--.

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