Books with category War & Conflict
Displaying 5 books

The Boy Who Dared

The Boy Who Dared is a powerful and gripping novel by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, about a youth in Nazi Germany who dares to tell the truth about Hitler. This story, taken from Bartoletti's Newbery Honor Book, Hitler Youth, is fleshed out into a thought-provoking novel.

When 16-year-old Helmut Hubner listens to the BBC news on an illegal short-wave radio, he quickly discovers that Germany is lying to its people. Courageously, he tries to expose the truth through leaflets, leading to his trial for treason.

Sentenced to death and awaiting execution in a jail cell, Helmut's story unfolds in a series of flashbacks. These reveal his growth from a naive child caught up in the patriotism of the times, to a sensitive and mature young man who learns to think for himself.

This novel is a testament to the power of youth, courage, and the relentless pursuit of truth.

The Drowned and the Saved

2017

by Primo Levi

The Drowned and the Saved is a profound exploration by Primo Levi as he attempts to understand the rationale behind the atrocities of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen. Levi dismisses the stereotyped images of brutal Nazi torturers and helpless victims, drawing extensively on his own experiences to delve into the minds and motives of oppressors and oppressed alike.

He describes the difficulty and shame of remembering, the limited forms of collaboration between inmates and SS goalers, the exploitation of useless violence, and the plight of the intellectual. Levi writes about the issue of power, mercy, and guilt, and their effects on the lives of the ordinary people who suffered so incomprehendingly.

Through his writing, Levi warns and reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again, urging us to learn from the past to make sense of the senseless.

The Invisible Bridge

2010

by Julie Orringer

The Invisible Bridge is a grand love story and an epic tale of three brothers whose lives are torn apart by war.

Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to C. Morgenstern on the rue de Sévigné. As he becomes involved with the letter’s recipient, his elder brother takes up medical studies in Modena, and their younger brother leaves school for the stage. Meanwhile, Europe’s unfolding tragedy sends each of their lives into terrifying uncertainty.

From the Hungarian village of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the lonely chill of Andras’s garret to the enduring passion he discovers on the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of a Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labor camps and beyond, The Invisible Bridge tells the unforgettable story of brothers bound by history and love, of a marriage tested by disaster, of a Jewish family’s struggle against annihilation, and of the dangerous power of art in a time of war.

Queen of Swords

2006

by Sara Donati

It is the late summer of 1814, and Hannah Bonner and her half-brother Luke have spent more than a year searching the islands of the Caribbean for Luke’s wife and the man who abducted her. However, Jennet’s rescue, so long in coming, is not the resolution they’d hoped for. In the spring, she had given birth to Luke’s son, and in the summer, Jennet had found herself compelled to surrender the infant to a stranger in the hope of keeping him safe.

To claim the child, Hannah, Luke, and Jennet must journey first to Pensacola. There they learn a great deal about the family that has the baby. The Poiterins are a very rich, very powerful Creole family, totally without scruple. The matriarch of the family has left Pensacola for New Orleans and taken the child she now claims as her great-grandson with her.

New Orleans is a city on the brink of war, a city where prejudice thrives and where Hannah, half Mohawk, must tread softly. Careful plans are made as the Bonners set out to find and reclaim young Nathaniel Bonner. Plans that go terribly awry, isolating them from each other in a dangerous city at the worst of times.

Sure that all is lost, and sick unto death, Hannah finds herself in the care of a family and a friend from her past, Dr. Paul de Guise Savard dit Saint-d’Uzet. It is Dr. Savard and his wife who save Hannah’s life, but Dr. Savard’s half-brother who offers her real hope. Jean-Benoit Savard, the great-grandson of French settlers, slaves, and Choctaw and Seminole Indians, is the one man who knows the city well enough to engineer the miracle that will reunite the Bonners and send them home to Lake in the Clouds.

With Ben Savard’s guidance, allies are drawn from every segment of New Orleans’s population and from Andrew Jackson’s army, now pouring into the city in preparation for what will be the last major battle of the War of 1812.

The Wandering Fire

2001

by Guy Gavriel Kay

In the second novel in Guy Gavriel Kay's critically acclaimed Fionavar Tapestry, five men and women from our world must play their parts in a colossal war, as the first of all worlds confronts an ancient evil.

After a thousand years of imprisonment, the Unraveller has broken free and frozen Fionavar in the ice of eternal winter. His terrible vengeance has begun to take its toll on mortals and demi-gods, mages and priestesses, dwarves and the Children of Light.

The five brought from Earth across the tapestry of worlds must act to wake the allies Fionavar desperately needs. But no one can know if these figures out of legend have power enough to shatter the icy grip of death upon the land—or if they even want to...

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