With holidays approaching and family get-togethers on the horizon, a little planning ahead helps with both gift-giving and topics for dinner conversation. A few of our recent favorite books and upcoming November releases related to World War II history are listed below for your reading or gift list.
Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime by Max Hirshfeld
Photographer Max Hirshfeld (born 1951) tells his parents’ Nazi-era love story through photographs and hundreds of post-war letters. The material collected in Sweet Noise grapples with a 75-year-old legacy yet remains eerily timely. Available now.
Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival by Tom Clavin
On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin’s Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story. Publication date: November 2, 2021.
When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers by Ken Krimstein
From the prize-winning author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a stunning graphic narrative of newly discovered stories from Jewish teens on the cusp of WWII.
When I Grow Up is New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein’s new graphic nonfiction book, based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teens on the brink of WWII-found in 2017 hidden in a Lithuanian church cellar. Publication date: November 16, 2021.
From the grips of the Nazis to the top of the Olympic podium, from the cheap seats to center stage at Madison Square Garden, from yellow stars to silver spoons, this complex tale traverses the spectrum of the human experience to detail how perseverance, love, and legacy can survive through generations, carried on the shoulders of a simple and beautiful game. Publication date: November 30, 2021.