Charles Glass, former chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News, uses his considerable research and storytelling skills to uncover the little-known story of SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents George and John Starr.

American readers may be unfamiliar with the SOE, a volunteer organization sometimes called “Churchill’s secret army.” With secret headquarters on Baker Street, not far from today’s Sherlock Holmes Museum, the SOE recruited ordinary men and women to parachute into Nazi-occupied countries including France, Denmark and the Netherlands. There they braved danger on a daily basis, working with local resistance groups to conduct sabotage and collect intelligence. As the SOE’s French section head, Maurice Buckmaster, said, “It was no use trying to do things by the book. There was no book.”

Using newly declassified documents and family archives, Charles Glass focuses on the wartime experiences of two SOE agents, brothers George and John Starr. As head of the WHEELWRIGHT circuit, George Starr operated in southwest France, where he played a key role in helping to delay the Nazi arrival in Normandy following the Allied invasion. John Starr operated primarily in Burgundy. But in July 1943 he was betrayed by a double agent and arrested. After attempting to escape, he was wounded, tortured and imprisoned at Gestapo counterespionage headquarters in Paris. He was later sent to concentration camps, where he managed to survive.

While They Fought Alone may read like a thriller, the enormous toll that the war took on George and John Starr is palpable. As we approach the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019, this book is a timely reminder of what it took to defeat tyranny.

We are living in a world of technological marvels, with each decade bringing increased numbers of medical breakthroughs. However, one disease that has been very tough for scientists to track and understand is the ever-mutating influenza virus. In Pandemic 1918, historian Catharine Arnold provides a detailed and chilling look at the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, explaining what has been learned in the 100 years since this deadly epidemic, which killed more than 50 million people.

Arnold gives firsthand accounts from those who witnessed and survived the Spanish flu’s deadly grip while examining its impact. By exploring family memories, journals and medical documents, she is able to focus on these personal stories that have been preserved and handed down over the years.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the Spanish flu was that it often struck the healthiest rather than the elderly, young or weak. Victims included farm boys who were going off to fight in World War I. Arnold notes, “By the end of the war, more Americans died from Spanish flu than perished in the war.” The war also aided the flu’s spread, with soldiers coming from around the globe to fight. As described by one health officer at the time, Spanish flu “came like a thief in the night, its onset rapid, and insidious.”

Arnold also provides a touchstone to more recent flu epidemics, such as the Hong Kong bird flu in the late 1990s. She explains how scientists have been able to exhume and examine tissue samples from those who succumbed to Spanish flu to learn more about its causes and the virus’s ability to jump from animals to humans. As she cautions, “The threat of pandemic flu is as severe as that of a terrorist attack.”

In a sense, The Last Palace was conceived when Norman Eisen, U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic under Barack Obama, was lying under a table. Eisen had just had a thought-provoking phone conversation with his mother, Frieda, a Jewish Czech-American and Holocaust survivor who was reluctant to visit him at his gorgeous ambassador’s “palace” in Prague because of her harrowing memories of the Nazi and Communist years. A table in his new palatial home had an inventory label underneath it signifying that it had been used by the Nazis, and Eisen wanted a closer look. As he peered up, he realized that it also had marks affixed by the wealthy Jewish family that built the mansion and, more recently, by the U.S. government. There it was, on a piece of furniture: the Czech experience of the 20th century.

Eisen, ambassador from 2011 to 2014, has written a genuinely exciting history of the era, seen through the lives of Frieda and four people who lived in the mansion: Otto Petschek, the Jewish magnate who built it; Rudolf Toussaint, the general in charge of German troops in Nazi-occupied Prague; Laurence Steinhardt, the first postwar U.S. ambassador; and Shirley Temple Black, child superstar-turned-ambassador, stationed there during the Velvet Revolution.

Based on voluminous research, the book offers a detailed, novelistic view of stirring times and impressive characters. For all his riches, Petschek is ultimately a sad figure, unable to understand the fragility of his world. Even the conflicted Toussaint evokes some modest sympathy, as he loathed the Nazis.

Steinhardt and Black, however, were inarguably heroic. Steinhardt fought to preserve democracy; when he lost, he helped endangered friends escape. With impeccable timing, Black publicly supported the dissidents who overthrew the Communists. And through it all, we follow the indomitable Frieda, who survives the Holocaust to raise the American son whose success completes her family’s journey from persecution to prominence.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the early 1980s, hardcore punk offered alienated American teenagers a chance to find each other through its network of scenes, shows and zines. It offered a crucial lifeline for kids who were coming out of abusive homes, suffering bullying at schools or simply resisting Reagan-era conservatism.

But Americans had nothing on the East German punks, as Tim Mohr brilliantly documents in his incendiary Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

As early as 1977, kids throughout East Germany heard the siren call of the Sex Pistols by tuning into banned West German radio stations. By 1981, a nascent punk scene began forming in church basements and town squares. But the consequences of looking like a punk or forming a band were dangerous. Getting hauled in by the Stasi—the East German secret police—for brutal interrogations became a daily or weekly occurrence for punks. Studios and squats were routinely searched, and being surveilled by informers was a fact of life. By 1983—the “Summer of Punk”—many of the original punks were serving prison sentences. But the flame was lit, and the torch was carried on by hundreds of kids who formed bands, squatted buildings and spoke out against the state.

Compulsively readable and beautifully researched, Burning Down the Haus records the critical role that punks played in the German resistance movements of the 1980s, up to and beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a DJ in Berlin in the early 1990s, Mohr met and became friends with many of the individuals portrayed in this book, thus giving him access to the photos, diaries and oral histories that give the book such rich, cinematic detail.

“We could do things differently here,” East German punks said, and it was a pronouncement they acted on. Their story of resistance to dictatorship is an inspiring lesson for today.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the years after World War I, as Hitler and his followers gained attention and then power in Germany, many foreign visitors, especially from Britain and the United States, poured into the country. Foreigners continued to be captivated by Germany’s natural beauty, its strong cultural heritage in literature, music and philosophy, its technological advances and the friendliness of its citizens. Years later, when those visitors looked back at their prewar visits, most genuinely claimed that they could not have been aware of the terrible actions of the Nazis. Despite rumors and evidence of disturbing activity, many had made up their minds before they came of what they were to see—or not see. Surprisingly few, it seems, had their minds changed as a direct result of their visits.

Julia Boyd has done exhaustive research on these visitors and their firsthand accounts of their visits. In her extraordinary and absorbing Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919-1945, she tells their stories, often in their own words, as they “accidentally witnessed,” in varying degrees, the transformation of a government and its people before their eyes. The author’s nuanced and lively narrative shows that a vigorous propaganda campaign by the Nazis, targeted toward tourists and other visitors, was hugely successful for years but became less so as the government tightened its control on the eve of World War II.

Foreign diplomats and reporters followed events closely and generally understood what was going on. But others who were visiting for relatively short periods, including such keen observers as scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, were bewildered by the truth. In 1936, Du Bois wrote that it was hard to “express an opinion about Germany today which is true in all respects without numerous modifications and explanations.” That same year, author Thomas Wolfe, who loved Germany and whose novels were bestsellers there, dared to speak out in an essay critical of the regime after a Jewish acquaintance was arrested, leading to great personal cost.

These firsthand glimpses of a dark time in Germany show us the complexity of appearances, and Boyd’s book should be widely read.

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

Meet Louise Thaden, a married mother of two; Ruth Elder, a beautiful Alabama divorcée; Ruth Nichols, a woman unhappily born into wealth; and Florence Klingensmith, whose promising aviation career ended in tragedy. True resisters, they were empowered by their recently gained right to vote and inspired by aviation’s rising popularity. Charles Lindbergh’s recent solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 was an achievement that begged for a female challenger, and it had one soon enough.

O’Brien keeps a sharp eye on the planes as well. The flimsily built early aircraft regularly lost their wings, shed their wheels and exploded in flames, sometimes miraculously leaving their pilots alive and eager to fly again. Men found financial support—and better planes—much easier to come by than women, who routinely faced reporters asking why they weren’t at home cooking dinner. Elder and Klingensmith tried to dodge the husband question, while Earhart allowed her husband, prominent New York publisher George P. Putnam, to be her relentless PR man who “probably saved her from becoming a nice old maid.”

The women of aviation were “friendly enemies,” competing for speed and distance records while supporting each other on the ground and in the air. Known collectively as the Ninety Nines, they encouraged young women to aim high. As Earhart said, a woman’s place “is wherever her individual aptitude places her.”

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

By the early 20th century, thanks to Queen Victoria’s prodigious matchmaking, almost all the ruling families across Europe were related. Among Victoria’s favorite grandchildren was Alexandra Feodorovna, who went on to marry her cousin Nicholas II, the czar of Russia. Alexandra’s new husband looked so similar to George, their mutual cousin and the future king of England, that they could have passed for identical twins.

So why, given all the family ties, were “Alicky” and “Nicky” left to die at the hands of revolutionaries? Many of the royal cousins attempted to create a plan for rescue, but the bulk of the blame for their deaths has generally been laid on King George V. But in her new book, The Race to Save the Romanovs, historian Helen Rappaport argues that British anti-royal sentiment in that era was so strong that rescuing the Romanovs could have been disastrous for King George’s family.

This is not the sweet, sacrificial Nicholas and Alexandra of other biographies. Rappaport writes—with substantial evidence—that the czar was a weak leader, and the czarina was a decided and sometimes oblivious partisan. They were, however, deeply devoted to one another and to their children. Rappaport concludes that no rescue attempt would have succeeded because the Romanovs would never have abandoned the motherland.

Ultimately, however, what resonates is the irony of the book’s title. There was no “race,” or even a jog: The Romanovs were all but abandoned by their extended family.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1542, the Omagua tribe of the Amazon River basin made a terrible strategic mistake: They saved the lives of a band of starving Spanish explorers. After the Spaniards recovered, they continued upriver, pillaging and killing. So began the violence and despoliation that continue today. The Omagua are barely hanging on; many other tribes are gone forever.

Chris Feliciano Arnold’s The Third Bank of the River presents a wide-ranging panorama of this vast region in western Brazil, so full of both promise and suffering. Combining history, contemporary reporting and memoir, Arnold entwines the stories of the region’s Amazon River basin’s endangered indigenous tribes, the violence of the jungle city Manaus and its economy of environmental exploitation and cocaine trafficking.

The days when rubber barons worked natives to death are gone, but the tribes still face threats—particularly from the diseases of Caucasians. In one astonishing incident from 2014, an isolated tribe under pressure from illegal loggers raided a less isolated village, but were gravely sickened by contact with stolen clothing.

In Manaus, the paramilitary police have become a gang competing with drug cartels. In retaliation for the killing of an off-duty cop, death squads of officers assassinated dozens of random victims in drive-by shootings during 2015’s “Bloody Weekend.” Arnold follows the investigation into the massacre, and uncovers the life of one victim—an ordinary man who loved to dance.

In these travels, Arnold is undergoing his own process of self-discovery. Born in Brazil, then adopted as an infant by an Oregon family, he sees how easily he could have been one of the lost boys of Manaus. But all is not hopeless: public health experts treat the tribes, anthropologists debate how best to protect them, missionaries do their best to help. Brazil’s political system may be in crisis, but decent individuals persevere.

Richard Rhodes’ dazzling Energy: A Human History tells a compulsively readable tale of human need, curiosity, ingenuity and arrogance. In a fast-paced narrative, he conducts readers on a journey from humanity’s dependence on wood as the primary fuel source to the use of coal and up to the development of nuclear energy and solar energy.

Along the way, Rhodes introduces readers to inventors and scientists whose discoveries fueled work on various methods of extracting and harnessing different sources of energy. Readers will be familiar with stories about Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity and James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, but Rhodes also introduces lesser-known innovators like Denis Papin, the 18th-century scientist who invented a double-acting steam engine that Watt used as a model, but whose inventions were never supported by others, and Richard Trevithick, the 19th-century inventor of a portable steam engine, among many others.

Rhodes judiciously points out that the overdependence on various sources of energy leads to their depletion and to dangerous threats to health such as air and water pollution. Rhodes concludes that the greatest challenge for the 21st century will be limiting global warming while providing energy for a population that will grow by 25 percent by 2100. This exceptional book is required reading for anyone concerned about the human impact on the future of the world. Rhodes optimistically predicts that by using all sources of energy—nuclear, solar and renewable resources—the world can meet the needs of its growing population.