Shogun is a 1975 novel by American author James Clavell. It is one of six books in Clavell’s Asian Saga, which chronicles the ways Europeans interacted with countries in Asia from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The novel tells the story of English ship pilot John Blackthorne, loosely based on the real life navigator William Adams, who becomes intimately involved in the rise to power of Yoshi Toranaga, a fictionalized version of Tokugawa Ieyasu... Read Shogun Summary

Shooting Kabul is a middle-grade novel published in 2010 by American author N. H. Senzai. In July 2001, 11-year-old Fadi Nurzai and his family flee Afghanistan, where the Taliban are taking power, to live in San Francisco. While boarding the truck in Kabul that will take them across the Pakistani border, Fadi loses his six-year-old sister, Mariam, in the melee, and she is left behind. The novel focuses on Fadi’s struggle with his conscience over losing... Read Shooting Kabul Summary

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Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1969 science fiction novel written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The novel deals with anti-war themes and time travel while centering its narrative around the bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of the most important anti-war and science fiction novels of the 20th century and has been adapted into films, theatre productions, and radio plays. Plot SummaryThe narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five is told in a... Read Slaughterhouse-Five Summary

Gary Paulsen’s young adult novel Soldier’s Heart: Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers highlights a young soldier’s experience in the Civil War. Many of the novel’s plot events are based on historical records, as is the novel’s main character Charley, who is based on the actual soldier Charley Goddard. However, Paulsen takes liberties within the story and notes that parts of the... Read Soldiers Heart Summary

“Soldier’s Home” is a short story first published in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 debut collection In Our Time. The version discussed in this guide is from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (Scribner, 2003).The story’s protagonist is Harold Krebs, a young man who returns home to Oklahoma after serving in World War I. It is one of many works by Hemingway, a WWI survivor, to show the impacts of the war... Read Soldier's Home Summary

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Someone Named Eva is a 2007 middle-grade historical fiction novel by American teacher and children’s author Joan M. Wolf. The book is set around the 1942 Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and Slovakia) during World War II. The story follows 11-year-old Milada Kralicek and her journey of loss and rediscovery. Milada struggles to remember her Czech family and identity after Nazi soldiers kidnap her and force her to... Read Someone Named Eva Summary

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Sophie’s Choice (1979) is one of William Styron’s better-remembered novels. It is described as an American classic or historical fiction, though it falls squarely into the category of adult literary fiction. The book would be unsuitable for younger readers because of its explicit treatment of sex. It won the 1980 National Book Award and became a bestseller. The 1982 film adaptation, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, garnered an Oscar for Streep’s performance.Sophie’s Choice stirred... Read Sophie's Choice Summary

Harvard history professor Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) explicates the central role of the 19th century New Orleans slave market in supporting the Southern slave trade. Johnson’s main contention is that slavery was a tragic “byproduct” of the sugar, tobacco, and cotton industries. Johnson pairs primary sources, such as slave accounts, with bills of sale and slaveholder correspondence in his reconstruction of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson shows... Read Soul by Soul Summary

After his brother Lenny joins the Marine Corps, Williams dreams of following in his footsteps. When Lenny dies a few years later, Williams joins the Marine Reserves. For a year he serves as a “weekend warrior,” while attending college, until, in August of 1990, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army invades Kuwait. Williams’s unit is activated in November and he is forced to leave college and go to war.Through training, deployment, and eventually combat, Williams journeys toward... Read Spare Parts Summary

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One of the most controversial works of speculative fiction, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers tells of a war between Earth and two alien species, as seen through the eyes of a young soldier. First published in 1959, the book became an early sci-fi bestseller and won a Hugo award. The e-book version of the 2018 Ace Premium edition is the basis for this guide.Plot SummaryHundreds of years in the future, Juan “Johnnie” Rico goes against... Read Starship Troopers Summary

Shy, 12-year-old Margaret and her high-spirited friend Elizabeth question their beliefs about WWII when they discover that the brother of their school nemesis is a deserter in Mary Downing Hahn’s middle grade historical fiction novel, Stepping on the Cracks (1991). The novel explores themes of moral ambiguity, war, friendship, and domestic abuse, drawing on Hahn’s childhood memories of growing up in College Park, Maryland. In a short biography at the end of the novel Hahn... Read Stepping on the Cracks Summary

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