Clearly it’s not just cats that have nine lives. In Robert Weintraub’s exceptionally well researched and engaging No Better Friend, we meet Judy, a purebred English pointer and hero of World War II.

Born in Shanghai in 1936, Judy was adopted as a mascot by the British Royal Navy and had already survived a ship’s sinking and a jungle march before encountering 23-year-old Royal Air Force technician Frank Williams. The two met in 1942 in a Japanese POW camp in Sumatra. After another prisoner who’d been slipping scraps to Judy died, Williams made a life-changing decision: He gave the dog his entire ration, beginning an inspiring partnership.

To protect Judy from being killed and eaten by guards, Frank convinced the camp commander to give the pointer official POW status. That paper was to save Judy’s life more than once.

Through luck, gumption and sheer force of will, Frank managed to keep himself and his dog alive in camp, on a harrowing march and even after a torpedo attack on a prisoner transport ship. And as for regulations that no animals would be allowed on the troopship returning survivors to England when the war ended, well, you can just imagine what this remarkable pair of friends did about that.

No Better Friend is an inspiring story, and one that both dog lovers and history buffs will embrace.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Nationhood was never a goal of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence refers to “Free and Independent States.” After the Revolutionary War ended, a majority of the population was opposed or indifferent to a transition from individual states to a federal government. In his brilliant and exciting new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, historian Joseph J. Ellis tells the story of how a small group of leaders, disregarding popular opinion, took the American story in a new direction.

There were four men of vision—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay—who led the way to the next stage of development. Ellis’ thesis may be controversial to some because he argues that radical change came not from “the people,” but from the political elite. It happened because the four leaders, all with impeccable revolutionary credentials, were keenly aware of the systemic dysfunction of the Articles of Confederation. They used their skills to call for a Constitutional Convention and, as best they could, to control the agenda. They even attempted to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions and then drafted the Bill of Rights (a popular move), which would, they thought, assure that states go along with the constitution. Ellis says that if he is right, “this was arguably the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history.”

Ellis offers insightful portraits of his main players and penetrating analyses of major issues while beautifully evoking the atmosphere of the era. The Quartet is the best kind of history—authoritative and superbly written.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The tactics may have changed, but the intent remains the same: North Korea is a mysterious, insular country that above all loathes the United States. Today, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un retains his tight grip on power through imprisonment and purges. His threats against the United States include missile testing and computer hacking. But Kim’s modern-day machinations simply mirror the early actions of his grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, who took control of North Korea following World War II and established the Kim family dynasty. Blaine Harden’s new book, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, describes the formation of that dynasty and offers one explanation for why North Korea hates the U.S.

Part of that hatred lies with the fighter pilot referenced in the book’s title. On September 21, 1953, North Korean fighter pilot No Kum Sok flew a Soviet MiG-15 out of his country, landing it in the hands of Americans based in South Korea. No became an instant celebrity, not only for his defection, but also for delivering a MiG-15 to the U.S. military, which set about studying its design and technology. In fact, the Pentagon was so anxious to get its hands on a MiG-15, it had earlier offered a $100,000 bounty to anyone who delivered a plane. No collected the reward. But to this day, No, an octogenarian living in Florida, claims he had no knowledge of the reward when he defected.

As for the “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung, embarrassment over the defection and the U.S. carpet-bombing of North Korea during the Korean War fueled a hatred for America that continues today.

If you are intrigued by the enigma that is North Korea, a reading of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot will supply valuable explanation and context for why its current leader behaves so badly.

The end of World War II in Europe brought a wide range of reactions, especially in Germany. From concentration camp prisoners to top Nazi officers, from refugees crowding the roads to soldiers eager to see the war finally over, there was a mixture of heartbreak, relief, chaos and disbelief. For German novelist Walter Kempowski, who died in 2007, researching and compiling those responses, through eyewitness accounts, letters and diaries, became a lifelong mission. The result was 10 volumes and a diary of his project’s progress.

The first part of this extraordinary collection to be published in the United States, Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, assembles what Kempowski called his “particles” to form a “collage” that brings four days in 1945 vividly to life: Friday, April 20, Hitler’s 56th birthday; Wednesday, April 25, when American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe; Monday, April 30, Hitler’s suicide; and Tuesday, May 8, the German surrender and VE Day. The power of the work comes from the great variety and volume of the personal accounts, many of them eloquent and moving.

The most heartbreaking entries come from concentration camp prisoners who describe the horrific conditions they were subjected to. Some of the most eloquent accounts are from Alisah Shek, daughter of a Prague civil engineer who was deported to Ausch-witz. She was held at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. “We sit here and watch: the worst thing they have done to us, is to rob us of reality, of the concept of reality. We know only a tormented, fear-filled world of cruelty, in which we are the victims of events, objects.” From Dieter Wellershoff, a German citizen: “I really can’t even grasp it. The Germany that I so loved is finished. Because it isn’t just a war that’s being lost. . . . I know just one thing, that I want to survive. I’m only nineteen years old. Everything should just be starting.” There are detailed descriptions of the last days of Hitler and his closest confidants, as recorded by his secretaries and valet. Until the very end, Hitler denied that he had started the war and claimed he had tried to stop it. 

This important book takes us beyond geography, statistics and battles and reveals the cost of war in very human terms.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Los Angeles would not exist as the sprawling, highly populated global center it is today were it not for one man. At the turn of the last century, William Mulholland, a civil servant self-educated in the ways of water engineering, all but willed Southern California’s future when he masterminded one of the greatest engineering projects of all time: the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Bringing massive amounts of water south to this day, this monumental achievement was wrapped in controversy from the start, and in our more conservation-oriented age, there is still resentment about how Los Angeles “stole” the water of the central Owens Valley, dooming that rural area to an arid fate. Still, even Mulholland’s critics concede that the colorful Irish immigrant was a visionary who shaped the way that precious water is controlled not only in California, but also throughout the West.

Mulholland’s story has been told before, but perhaps never so compellingly as Les Standiford tells it in Water to the Angels. Newly arrived in California, Mulholland began working for the water department as a well- and ditch-digger, but impressed the company president with his unvarnished candor and knowledge. Mulholland’s single-minded mission was to bring water to L.A., and, unlike many others, he never made a penny from the project beyond his public salary.

Standiford expertly weaves the internecine drama behind the building of the aqueduct with a modern inquiry into its legacy (and even touches upon the movie Chinatown, which used the bones of the story but played fast and loose with the facts). Water to the Angels leaves little doubt that the forward-thinking Mulholland was as original as the city he birthed.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, April 2015

It’s reassuring to discover that heroes, both ancient and modern, are not somehow supernaturally endowed after all. Indeed, they may come by their skills quite naturally. In the thoroughly absorbing Natural Born Heroes, which tracks heroism from the times of Zeus and Odysseus to the World War II bravery of a motley crew of fighters, Christopher McDougall makes it clear that incredible acts of strength and endurance are doable. His extensive knowledge of fitness training, nutrition and physiology winds artfully around a tale of superhuman resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Greek island of Crete, Hitler’s designated launching pad for the invasion of Russia.

By the time Crete’s WWII heroes succeed, we know every detail of how they did it, and how, by reviewing the knowledge and skills they possessed, it is possible for their modern counterparts to do the same. Our skills are inborn, McDougall argues, forgotten perhaps, but recoverable. These “natural strengths” can make anyone useful in the most challenging situations. Just ask Norina Bentzel, a Pennsylvania school principal who in 2001 saved her kindergarteners from a machete-armed intruder.

At the heart of McDougall’s story lies a similar David versus Goliath duel. The Goliath in this case was Hitler, who never saw these Davids coming. A band of British special forces—described as the least-likely combatants in all of Europe—managed to kidnap Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944 under the very nose of his fellow commander. Nazi retaliation against the locals was swift and bloody, yet Cretan resisters risked their lives to aid the kidnappers. How did they—both British commandos and locals—manage to flee the Nazi pursuers and traverse a mountain, with very little food or rest, and challenges at every turn?

McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller Born to Run and himself a highly trained athlete, solves this mystery with a witty eye for every detail, inspiring his own captive audience along the way.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The most notable assassination in history, of probably the single most influential man in European history, occurred in 44 B.C. The event changed the world, but not as the assassins had planned. Why and how did it happen? In The Death of Caesar, history and classics professor Barry Strauss offers both excellent historical detective work and riveting prose.

Strauss explains the historical context of Julius Caesar’s assassination and demonstrates how it became, for all practical purposes, the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire.

The three main conspirators—Cassius, Brutus and Decimus—said they acted to preserve the Republic, but the truth was more complicated. Ambition, greed and perhaps envy that Caesar had selected his grandnephew, Octavian, only 18 years old, to succeed him, were also motives. Cassius probably initiated the plot, but it was his brother-in-law, Brutus, who was essential to the murder. He had the authority and a reputation for ethical behavior; if he called Caesar a tyrant, his credibility would convince others and allow fellow conspirators to remain alive. Decimus, the closest to Caesar, served with him in the army for 10 years and played a crucial role in the plot. Caesar had made a decision to stay away from the Senate that day and was tricked by his good friend to go.

The Roman people and the conspirators both wanted peace and compromise. Caesar was dead, but Caesarism—the idea that a general and his legions could conquer the Republic—lived on. What the conspirators needed was a military coup. Instead, they committed murder and made speeches.

Meticulously researched and superbly written, The Death of Caesar is a vivid and readable exploration of a momentous event.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re an author with a family ghost, it would seem almost obligatory to write about it. Hannah Nordhaus’ “paternal grandfather’s maternal grandmother,” Julia Staab, haunts La Posada hotel in Santa Fe (or so lots of people believe). In American Ghost, Nordhaus offers a fascinating and nuanced account of her ancestral ghost story and her complicated clan.

The Staabs, German Jews by birth, were among the first American merchants in Santa Fe. Julia married the already successful Abraham in 1865; she died in the house at the age of 52. Seven children survived her.

The ghost story goes like this: Julia never recovered from a baby’s death; her husband abused her; she died violently, perhaps by Abraham’s hand; and she now haunts her old bedroom. Nordhaus establishes that this is romantic fiction, though she remains respectful of those who believe they’ve encountered the ghost.

The Staabs were wealthy businesspeople, but they were also dysfunctional. Nordhaus unearths depression, addiction, suicide and estrangement. She writes of her ancestors’ travails with perception and compassion. Along the way, she employs family history to explore the lives of German Jews (Julia’s much younger sister died at Theresienstadt), the renaissance of Santa Fe and changing attitudes toward illness. It’s a spirited ride.

Perhaps most entertaining are her present-day encounters with psychics, ghost hunters and spiritualists, all eager to help. Her quest culminates in a weird experience in Julia’s room, make of it what you will. She does eventually discover whatever we can now know of the “truth” of Julia’s life, but inevitably, Nordhaus’ journey really is a search for self, and we are privileged to be able to accompany her.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2015

In an interview some years ago, Erik Larson, author of such bestsellers as The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, called himself “an animator of history” rather than a historian. Indeed, he has always shown a brilliant ability to unearth the telling details of a story and has the narrative chops to bring a historical moment vividly alive. But in his new book, Larson simply outdoes himself.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania tells in riveting fashion the story of the final voyage of the top-of-the-line British passenger ship, which sailed from New York City on May 1, 1915, and was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland six days later. The magnificent ship went down in only 18 minutes. Of its 1,959 passengers and crew, only 764 survived. Among the dead were 123 Americans, and the sinking of the Lusitania is often cited as the reason President Wilson dropped his vow of neutrality and led America into World War I.

But the U.S. entry into the war was more complicated. Larson gets at this complexity by presenting a portrait of Wilson in emotional tumult after the sudden death of his first wife and the dawn of a romance with the woman who would become his second wife. Also contributing to the complexity of international relations were the ruthless actions of the Germans and the machinations of the British Admiralty, headed by Winston Churchill, which in a top-secret effort had cracked German codes and was tracking the U-boat that ultimately sank the Lusitania, but inexplicably did nothing to prevent it.

These are the realpolitik aspects of the story Larson weaves in alternating chapters. But what is most compelling about Dead Wake is that, through astonishing research, Larson gives us a strong sense of the individuals—passengers and crew—aboard the Lusitania, heightening our sense of anxiety as we realize that some of the people we have come to know will go down with the ship.

A story full of ironies and “what-ifs,” Dead Wake is a tour de force of narrative history.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Larson about Dead Wake.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939, was the first struggle against fascism in Europe as the powers of Germany and Italy, for their own purposes, joined with General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist (rebel) forces to oust the elected government. Although the Western democracies adopted a policy of nonintervention, volunteers came from many countries to assist the Republican government in the hope that fascism could be stopped. Unfortunately, five months after the Spanish war ended, World War II began in Europe. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun) shows in his fast-paced, often moving and revealing new book Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made, the earlier war served in numerous ways as a laboratory for the larger war.

Rhodes concisely explains the background of the Spanish Civil War and follows events chronologically, but he is only incidentally concerned with Spanish politics. Franco’s side won the war and he ruled Spain as an absolute dictator until his death in 1975. Instead, Rhodes has three major concerns: first, the stories of courageous individuals whose stories have either not been told or told incompletely; secondly, the achievements in constructive technology spurred by the war, such as medical advances in collecting blood and sorting casualties; thirdly, the extraordinary works of art, reportage and literature, by such figures as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell, that brought the tragedy to the attention of the world .

Some two million men and women fought in the war; at least 200,000 were killed and many more injured. There were an abundance of compelling figures involved, often doing their life-saving work under incredibly difficult conditions. American surgeon Edward Barsky, in an unpublished memoir, provided the title for Rhodes’s book. Barsky had been a busy doctor in New York but agreed to help raise funds for medical equipment for the Spanish Republicans and recruit people with exceptional medical and nursing skills. He agreed to lead a contingent of U.S. volunteers. Once in Spain, he found that the red crosses painted on the roofs of his ambulances not only were not respected, they became prime targets in a war of attrition. He coped with problems in lines of authority and language. Stolen equipment, inadequate facilities, unceasing war and an unending flow of casualties followed. Eventually, Barsky’s team became the largest and best-equipped medical unit. His remarkable life after Spain found him serving in World War II and aiding various humanitarian and human rights causes, despite U.S. government harassment. He also helped provide emergency medical services for civil rights workers in the American South.

Wherever she was assigned, skilled British nurse and midwife Patience Darton went to work improving conditions that were often deplorable. This frequently brought her into conflict with her co-workers. Two surgeons, Frederic Durán Jordà from Spain and Norman Bethune from Canada, developed an innovative national blood distribution program. Despite the fact that Bethune’s team would be responsible for 78 percent of all blood transfusions on the Republican side during the war, some Canadian Communists conspired successfully to have him expelled from Spain.

Many gifted men and women felt it was important to offer their skills to the cause of democracy in a small but pivotal war at a hinge of history. Their hope was that if they were successful it would delay or prevent a wider war. Rhodes relates their stories in a superbly engrossing narrative that packs a lot of information and drama and reminds us of the importance of individual lives in wartime.

Although Orwell noted that his time in Spain had left him with “memories that are mostly evil,” at the same time, “Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.” We meet some of them in this enlightening book.