Military Reads

The Gift of Rain (2007) is a historical novel by Tan Twan Eng. Set in Penang, Malaysia, during World War II, the novel follows Philip Hutton, a Chinese British young man. As he navigates his dual heritage, Philip forms a complex relationship with a Japanese diplomat who becomes both his mentor and betrayer, forcing him to confront questions of loyalty, identity, and survival during the Japanese occupation. The Gift of Rain was Tan Twan Eng’s... Read The Gift of Rain Summary

Published in 2013, Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City tells the stories of Oak Ridge, a secret town that grew around plutonium processing plants in Tennessee, and of the women who worked there during the Second World War. A New York Times bestseller within its first week of publication, the book went on to receive the 2014 APSA Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Via the experiences of several new arrivals, the reader learns about Oak Ridge... Read The Girls of Atomic City Summary

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After is a 2018 memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, who at age six escaped the Rwandan genocide of 1994 with her older sister Claire. The memoir, which is co-authored by Elizabeth Weil, follows a dual narrative that alternates between scenes from Wamariya’s journey through seven African countries and from her life in America, where she moved in 2000. Wamariya describes the dehumanization of refugees... Read The Girl Who Smiled Beads Summary

Originally published in 2000, The Glass Palace is Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel and tells the story of a family across three generations. It is set in Burma, Malaya, and India during a turbulent period in the region’s history. The book opens in 1885. In Mandalay, Burma, the British army begins to descend on the city and dethrone the royal family. An 11-year-old boy named Rajkumar is the only one who recognizes the thundering sound of... Read The Glass Palace Summary

The Good Lord Bird is a 2013 novel written by James McBride. It is set during three years of the slave era South and is a work of progressive Americana in the vein of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Good Lord Bird received the National Book Award and great critical acclaim, and is now being adapted into a television series for Showtime. It examines themes of slavery, loyalty, racism, and violent protest.Plot... Read The Good Lord Bird Summary

“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II was published in 1984 and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year. Written by Studs Terkel, the book is still considered a classic of oral history. Unlike traditional history, which tends to rely on written records and other material artifacts like works of art and literature or archaeological remains, oral histories collect information about past events through interviews with individuals who were... Read The Good War Summary

The Green Glass Sea is the 2006 children’s historical fiction and debut novel by American author Ellen Klages. Set in New Mexico in 1943, the story tells of 11-year-old Dewey Kerrigan, an outcast mechanical engineering prodigy who arrives to live with her father in the mysterious town of Los Alamos, New Mexico (also called the Hill). Dewey slowly learns that her father and several other scientists are working on a top-secret project called the “gadget.”... Read The Green Glass Sea Summary

Written in epistolary form, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a historical novel set during the German Occupation of the English Channel Islands during World War II (WWII). The novel was co-written by Mary Ann Shaffer, an editor, librarian, and bookshop clerk, and her niece, Annie Barrows, author of the Ivy and Bean children’s books series. Shaffer began writing the novel, but when she was diagnosed with cancer she requested Barrows’s help... Read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Summary

The Guns of August is a 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of nonfiction by Barbara W. Tuchman. Tuchman achieved prominence as a historian with her third book, The Zimmerman Telegram, and international fame with The Guns of August. Encompassing the European political arena from King Edward VII’s death through the first month of World War I, The Guns of August offers clarity on the causes of the war, its inevitability, and how it shaped the modern... Read The Guns of August Summary

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J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a classic high fantasy adventure novel first published in 1937. Tolkien (1892-1973) was an English writer, philologist, and professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, as well as a close friend of fellow writer C. S. Lewis. The Hobbit is the first published work recounting tales from Middle Earth, Tolkien’s fantasy world with fictional races of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and more. After fighting in World War I, Tolkien worked... Read The Hobbit Summary

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The Huntress is a historical fiction novel published in 2019 by the American author Kate Quinn. Set in the years before, during, and after World War II, the novel weaves together the stories of three central characters: a Russian pilot in the Soviet Red Army’s all-female bomber unit; an American photographer whose father falls in love with a mysterious Austrian woman; and an English war correspondent committed to exposing Nazi war criminals. According to Washington... Read The Huntress Summary

The Iliad is a classic ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, a name believed to refer to a tradition of epic hexameter verse rather than an individual composer. When, how, and by whom the poem was composed continues to be debated. Scholars generally believe the poem was composed and passed on orally, possibly over hundreds of years, before it was written down at some point during the mid-8th century BC (approximately when the Greek... Read The Iliad Summary

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016), by American author and journalist Timothy Egan, is a biography of Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish revolutionary and American Civil War hero who later became the governor of the Montana Territory. Egan's narrative captures Meagher's tumultuous journey, from his fight for Irish independence to his contributions in America, focusing on broader themes of exile, resilience, and identity. Egan contextualizes Meagher’s life against the... Read The Immortal Irishman Summary

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“Their Finest Hour” is a speech originally given by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on June 18, 1940, in the House of Commons to members of Parliament and his ministerial cabinet. Churchill delivered the speech following the disastrous campaign of the Battle of France and the hasty evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk. In June 1940, Nazi boots marched in Paris, and the surrender of the French government seemed imminent. The speech... Read Their Finest Hour Summary

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