Editorial Content for Friday on My Mind: A Frieda Klein Mystery
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
The Frieda Klein Mystery series by the husband-and-wife team collectively known as Nicci French stays with me. I’ve written here and elsewhere about the occasional difficulty that we readers of a certain age have in keeping track of the characters and situations in ongoing series that are added to on an annual (or more) basis. Happily I don’t experience that with this series. Part of it is the uniqueness of the character. Frieda Klein is a troubled, damaged-but-not-broken psychotherapist in private practice who in the past has worked with the London police. Read More
Teaser
A bloated corpse turns up in the Thames, throat slashed, and the only clue is a hospital wristband reading Dr. F. Klein. Frieda is taken to see the body and realizes with horror that it is Sandy, her ex-boyfriend. She’s certain that the killer is Dean Reeve --- the man who has never stopped haunting her. But the police think he has been dead for years, and Frieda is their number one suspect. With few options, Frieda goes on the run to save herself and try to uncover the truth.
Promo
A bloated corpse turns up in the Thames, throat slashed, and the only clue is a hospital wristband reading Dr. F. Klein. Frieda is taken to see the body and realizes with horror that it is Sandy, her ex-boyfriend. She’s certain that the killer is Dean Reeve --- the man who has never stopped haunting her. But the police think he has been dead for years, and Frieda is their number one suspect. With few options, Frieda goes on the run to save herself and try to uncover the truth.
About the Book
In Nicci’s French’s thrilling fifth book, London psychotherapist Frieda Klein herself becomes the prime suspect in a murder.
A bloated corpse turns up in the Thames, throat slashed, and the only clue is a hospital wristband reading Dr. F. Klein. Frieda is taken to see the body and realizes with horror that it is Sandy, her ex-boyfriend. She’s certain that the killer is Dean Reeve --- the man who has never stopped haunting her. But the police think he has been dead for years, and Frieda is their number one suspect. With few options, Frieda goes on the run to save herself and try to uncover the truth.
Audiobook available, read by Beth Chalmers
Editorial Content for Fields of Battle: Pearl Harbor, the Rose Bowl, and the Boys Who Went to War
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
The front and end papers of FIELDS OF BATTLE are the rosters for the teams in the 1942 Rose Bowl, played between Oregon State and Duke at Durham, North Carolina. None of the names are overly familiar; the only one that’s close to being recognizable is that of Tommy Prothro, a star for the Duke team who is best remembered for his later career as a college and pro coach. Read More
Teaser
In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 1942 Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena to Duke University out of fear of further Japanese attacks on the West Coast. Shortly after this unforgettable game, many of the players and coaches left their respective colleges, entered the military, and went on to serve around the world in famous battlegrounds. Fate and destiny would bring them back together on faraway battlefields, fighting on the same team. FIELDS OF BATTLE sheds light on a little-known slice of American history where World War II and football intersect.
Promo
In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 1942 Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena to Duke University out of fear of further Japanese attacks on the West Coast. Shortly after this unforgettable game, many of the players and coaches left their respective colleges, entered the military, and went on to serve around the world in famous battlegrounds. Fate and destiny would bring them back together on faraway battlefields, fighting on the same team. FIELDS OF BATTLE sheds light on a little-known slice of American history where World War II and football intersect.
About the Book
In the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 1942 Rose Bowl was moved from Pasadena to Durham, North Carolina, out of fear of Japanese attacks on the West Coast. It remains the only Rose Bowl game to ever be played outside of Pasadena. Duke University, led by legendary coach Wallace Wade Sr., faced off against underdog Oregon State College, with both teams preparing for a grueling fight on the football field while their thoughts wandered to the battlefields they would soon be on.
As the players and coaches prepared for the game, America was preparing for war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the Allied strategy in Europe; a discussion that would change the lives of the boys and men on the field in Durham.
Finally, on New Year’s Day 1942, under dark gray skies and occasional rain, the two teams clashed on the gridiron in front of a crowd of 56,000, playing one of the most unforgettable games in history. Shortly afterward, many of the players and coaches entered the military and would quickly become brothers on the battlefield. Scattered around the globe, the lives of Rose Bowl participants would intersect in surprising ways, as they served in Iwo Jima and Normandy, Guadalcanal and the Battle of the Bulge. Four players from that Rose Bowl game would lose their lives, while many more were severely wounded. In one powerful encounter on the battlefield, OSC’s Frank Parker saved the life of Duke’s Charles Haynes as he lay dying on a hill in Italy. And one OSC player, Jack Yoshihara, a Japanese-American, never had the chance to play in the game or serve his country, as he was sent to an internment camp in Idaho.
In this riveting an emotional tale, Brian Curtis sheds light on a little-known slice of American history and captures in gripping detail an intimate account of the teamwork, grit and determination that took place on both the football fields and the battlefields of World War II. It was a game created by infamy and a war fought by ordinary boys who did the extraordinary.
Editorial Content for Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America's Free Press
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Even before our nation was founded, newspaper publishers found that criticizing government officials was good for business. And many times, those critical attacks drew heated responses from those in power, resulting in political retaliation that often turned political protest into heroism. In 1733, the newly appointed colonial governor of New York, William Cosby, engaged in a political battle regarding his salary and overall governance. Read More
Teaser
When Britain began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule and any words that disparaged the government were a punishable crime. So when a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, it was the paper’s publisher, John Peter Zenger, who took the fall. Although Zenger was merely a front man for Cosby’s true adversaries, he was jailed for the better part of a year and faced a jury in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials.
Promo
When Britain began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule and any words that disparaged the government were a punishable crime. So when a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, it was the paper’s publisher, John Peter Zenger, who took the fall. Although Zenger was merely a front man for Cosby’s true adversaries, he was jailed for the better part of a year and faced a jury in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials.
About the Book
The liberty of written and spoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of our social values since our nation’s beginning --- the government of the United States was the first to legalize free speech and a free press as fundamental rights. But when the British began colonizing the New World, strict censorship was the iron rule of the realm; any words, true or false, that were thought to disparage the government were judged a criminally subversive --- and duly punishable --- threat to law and order. Even after Parliament lifted press censorship late in the 17th century, printers published what they wished at their peril.
So when in 1733 a small newspaper, the New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles assailing the new British governor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive, colonial New York was scandalized. The paper’s publisher, an impoverished printer named John Peter Zenger with a wife and six children, in fact had no hand in the paper’s vitriolic editorial content --- he was only a front man for Cosby’s adversaries, New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Lewis Morris and the shrewd attorney James Alexander. Zenger nevertheless became the endeavor’s courageous fall guy when Cosby brought the full force of his high office down upon it. Jailed for the better part of a year, Zenger faced a jury on August 4, 1735, in a proceeding matched in importance during the colonial period only by the Salem Witch Trials.
In INDELIBLE INK, acclaimed social historian Richard Kluger recreates in rich detail this dramatic clash of powerful antagonists that marked the beginning of press freedom in America and its role in vanquishing colonial tyranny. Here is an enduring lesson that resounds to this day on the vital importance of free public expression as the underpinning of democracy.
Audiobook available, read by Tom Perkins
Editorial Content for Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
At the height of the Cold War and after years of training, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead investigative operations in East Berlin. She risked her life daily in order to gather classified information for the US government about East Germany’s notoriously oppressed and closed society. Since leaving the post, she has spent nearly three decades working abroad in a variety of other government and non-profit positions, living in Moscow, Prague, Minsk, Ottawa and Istanbul. Read More
Teaser
FORTY AUTUMNS makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. Here, Nina Willner recounts her family’s story --- five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.
Promo
FORTY AUTUMNS makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. Here, Nina Willner recounts her family’s story --- five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.
About the Book
In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family --- of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
FORTY AUTUMNS makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At 20, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom --- leaving behind her parents, eight siblings and family home --- was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own.
Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner, became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives --- grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team --- a bitter political war kept them apart.
In FORTY AUTUMNS, Nina recounts her family’s story --- five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.
A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, FORTY AUTUMNS is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience and love --- of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.
FORTY AUTUMNS is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.
Audiobook available, read by Cassandra Campbell
Which fiction titles releasing in October are you planning to read? Please check all that apply.
October 7, 2016, 618 voters
Jonatan Mårtensson
Feelings are much like waves, we can't stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.
