Historical Survival

When Jewher Ilham's father, Ilham Tohti, an internationally known advocate for peaceful dialogue between his Uyghur people and Han Chinese, was detained at the Beijing airport in February 2013 on charges of "separatism," and later sentenced to life in prison, Jewher was forced to begin a new life apart from her family in a new country. There, she found her voice as an advocate for her father, and for Uyghur people being forced into concentration camps by the Chinese government.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother's stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family - a tailor named Savvas and his daughters - from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war. Years later, Yvette decided to track down the man's descendants - and eventually found them in Israel.

A lone soldier wearing a German uniform stumbles into a British military camp in the North African desert with an incredible story to tell. He is the only survivor of an undercover operation meant to infiltrate a Nazi base, trading on the soldiers’ perfect fluency in German. However, this man is not British-born but instead a German Jew seeking revenge for the deaths of his family back home in Berlin.

The Polaris is on a mission to explore new lands, and its crew is eager to bring their discoveries back home. But when members of the advance landing party mysteriously disappear, the remaining adults abandon ship, leaving behind the young cabin attendants and deckhands - none of them older than 12. With whispers of mutiny, a strange tropical illness, and perhaps even a wild beast shadowing them, the young sailors are desperate to steer the vessel to safety.

The place: rural Vermont. The time: the Great Depression. Henry Talcott's beautiful wife, Irene, has recently left him. He and their two young children, Thomas and Margaret, are spending the summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. It's a bittersweet idyll.

Caught in a storm one night, The Dundonald sunk after hitting the rocky coastline of a tiny subantarctic island known as Disappointment Island—arguably the dingiest bit of rock in the Auckland Islands archipelago, or Motu Maha (“Many Islands”) in Māori. This volcanic archipelago lies 500 km below Aotearoa New Zealand. Twelve on-board The Dundonald drowned that stormy night, 7 March 1907, including the captain and the captain’s son Jimmy, who accompanied his father on a sea voyage for the sake of his health. He was about to turn sixteen, three days later.

Hattie Barton’s life changes forever on October 24, 1929, the historic day of the New York stock market crash. She is suddenly forced to leave her palatial home in Calhoun, relocate to an apartment in her hometown in Greenville, and find work to support herself, her two young daughters Pauline and Alice, and her trusted housekeeper, Georgia. When she takes a job as secretary in a small insurance firm, a potential romance develops between Hattie and her boss, Seth Snoddy However, an unexpected turn causes her to reevaluate whether she can ever settle for a marriage of convenience.

It doesn't matter if you are a history buff or if you love human interest stories, I've found this book to be the most unexpected page turner that I've read in a very long time. It's the story of Charles Pierce who lived through six, terrifying years of being a slave to the Nazis facing death most virtually one minute after the next and...miraculously surviving. Then, having the courage to build a lasting, loving and happy marriage with a woman he would call his bride for over a half century.

When a spontaneous time leap sends Nickolas Flux back to Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Endurance Expedition to Antarctica, what's a teenage history buff to do? Try to avoid becoming stranded at the bottom of the world, of course!

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed south aboard the Endurance to be the first to cross Antarctica. Shackleton's endeavor is legend, but few know the astonishing story of the Ross Sea party, the support crew he dispatched to the opposite side of the continent to build a vital lifeline of food and fuel depots.

In the late nineteenth century, close diplomatic relations existed between the United States and Russia. All that changed when George Kennan went to Siberia in 1885 to investigate the exile system and his eyes were opened to the brutality Russia was wielding to suppress dissent. Over ten months Kennan traveled eight thousand miles, mostly in horse-drawn carriages, sleighs, or on horseback. He endured suffocating sandstorms in the summer and blizzards in the winter. His interviews with convicts and political exiles revealed how Russia ran on the fuel of inflicted pain and fear.

'I would be most unhappy to think that any part of this memoir should be cut on grounds of 'decency', for those bits are essential....' So begins the lively true story of aristocrat and travel writer Roderic Fenwick Owen. Born in 1921, Fenwick Owen had an extraordinary life, which careered between some of the biggest moments in history and took him to the ends of the earth, meeting (and even living with) some of the 20th century's most well-known people along the way, including Eisenhower, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Lee and Sean Connery.

James Capen Adams roamed the Sierra Nevada when California was wild. He slept on the ground, ate what he could kill, mended his own wounds, and made friends with the Native Americans he encountered. Adams captured animals in elaborate traps he built by hand and delivered his prey to zoos, museums, and certain famous exhibitions. Many of his stories became the inspiration for a popular TV show in the 1980s, featuring a mountain man and his pet bear. This is the true story behind the legend, as told by Adams to respected California historian Theodore Hittell.

Caesar is dead. Revenge has armed his hand. His name is Octavian. Though little more than a boy, Octavian, Caesar's heir is determined to avenge his adoptive father's death. Battling against some of Rome's most imposing political figures, Octavian surrounds himself with a group of loyal allies who are as determined as himself to succeed: Maecenas, Agrippa and Rufus. They become known and feared as the 'Invincibles'; dedicated to vengeance, with the aim of punishing, one by one, all those who have Caesar's blood on their hands.

Based on the true story of her mother, Mona Golabek describes the inspirational story of Lisa Jura's escape from Nazi-controlled Austria to England on the famed Kindertransport. Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura has a wonderful life in Vienna. But when the Nazis start closing in on the city, life changes irreversibly. Although he has three daughters, Lisa's father is only able to secure one berth on the Kindertransport. The family decides to send Lisa to London so that she may pursue her dreams of a career as a concert pianist.

Long the dominant icon embodying the spirit of America's frontier past, the image of the cowboy no longer stands alone as the ultimate symbol of independence and self-reliance. The great canvas of the Western landscape - in art, books, film - is today shared by the figures called "Mountain Men". Tales of the Mountain Men presents in one book many of the most engaging and revealing portraits of mountain men ever written.

A moving story, wrapped in humor, about love, loss, and hope in one of history’s darkest hours. 1933. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany marks the beginning of the end for the Jews of Europe. For little newborn Yaakov, this is only the beginning. Hungary, 1944. 11-year-old Yaakov and his parents and younger sister are forced out of their home into the unknown. They find themselves in the ghetto, living under impossible conditions, until they are banished by the Nazis to Bergen Belsen concentration camp through Austria, what might be their final destination.

Shorty is a Haitian boy trapped in the rubble of a hospital when an earthquake shatters the world around him. Surrounded by lifeless bodies and growing desperately weak from lack of food and water, death seems imminent. Yet as Shorty waits for a rescue that may never come, he becomes aware of another presence, one reaching out to him across two hundred years of history.

Judy Weissenberg is the mischievous and lively youngest child growing up in a large family in Debrecen, Hungary. But as the Nazis rise to power in Europe and anti-Jewish laws tear her family and community apart, Judy’s joyful youth becomes marred by fear and the hushed whispers of the adults around her. Then, in 1944, Germany occupies Hungary and Judy’s world is shattered.