With the Arab Spring occupying much of the media lately, resistance and liberation are not far from anyone’s mind these days. Caroline Moorehead looks at the topic from a new angle in A Train in Winter, which tells the story of 231 women of the French Resistance imprisoned during the German invasion of World War II. Moorehead weaves a historically accurate narrative of women banding together for survival in the face of death and deprivation.

The women’s story begins at the start of the German invasion, with teachers, students, chemists and writers printing anti-Nazi newspapers, transporting weapons, helping Jews to safety and relaying messages of the resistance. They were young and old, from cities and villages, and all determined to save their France. This defiance led to their eventual capture by the Gestapo, bringing them together first in a fort-turned-prison outside Paris and later, in the end, at Auschwitz in 1943.

With cooperation and resourcefulness, these women kept themselves educated, informed and safe, often hiding the sickest among them and putting on plays to maintain hope, as well as to remember who they were and were determined to be again. As many of the women died or heard of relatives and friends who died, their bond strengthened. “We didn’t stop to ask ourselves whom we liked and whom we didn’t,” one woman later explained. “It wasn’t so much friendship as solidarity. We just made certain we didn’t leave anyone alone.” This solidarity is what kept some alive and made sure that this story of terror, starvation and death was told.

By using original sources and giving each woman a name, the book can occasionally make the mind spin. However, the knowledge that these were real women makes the atrocities all the more real and their identities essential. The personal interviews and archival research are woven seamlessly into the narrative, making this war chronicle unforgettable. An appendix gives the names and stories of life and death of all 231 women.

Unforgettable and riveting, A Train in Winter is not an easy read. It is, however, an essential read for those who believe—or long to believe—in the power of friendship.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Most of us know that. But few of us know that Columbus made three additional voyages to what he believed until the end of his life was an outpost of India, a gateway to China. These subsequent voyages were, as Laurence Bergreen writes, “each more adventurous and tragic than those preceding it.” Columbus’ final voyage, made between 1502 and 1504 when he was crippled by arthritis and other infirmities, is an astonishing tale of shipwreck and rebellion, and because of its hardships it was the journey, Bergreen says, that was Columbus’ favorite.

Bergreen has written highly praised books about other explorers—Over the Edge, about Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and Marco Polo. That background allows him to provide both historical and psychological context in his portrait of Columbus. For example, knowing that Columbus was shaped by his youth in Genoa, at the time a fascinating but rapacious city-state that practiced slavery, casts his appalling enslavement of the native populations of the Caribbean in a somewhat different light. And Bergreen helps us understand the revolutionary nature of Columbus’ accomplishments, despite the fact that Columbus himself never quite grasped where he really was.

The Columbus who emerges here is an ambitious, adventurous, often autocratic man who has a “penchant for self-dramatization.” Deeply mystical, he believed he was on a mission from God, and through his knowledge of navigation he sometimes tricked his crews and the native populations into believing that too. On his third voyage he seemed delusional. “An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures,” Bergreen writes. In fact, one of the biggest surprises in Columbus: The Four Voyages is the discovery that Columbus was just as vilified in his own day as he has become in some quarters today.

In the end it is possible to respect but hard to admire Columbus. But it is easy to admire Bergreen’s account of Columbus’ life and his four voyages to the New World.