Books Across The Seas

Rationing, food shortages, and the clever ways people got around them are major themes in books about the British home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. Packages from friends in the United States made life easier for a lucky few. (C.A.R.E. packages came after the war.) I recently learned that books from…

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Florence Mendheim: Librarian Against the Nazis

Florence Mendheim (1899-1984) was the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants had moved to the United States in the 1880s and still had close contact with their family back in Berlin. She worked as a librarian in the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library for 25 years, from 1919 to 1944. In 1933, she…

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Empress of the Nile

  I am a fan of Lynne Olson’s work. I am also a lifelong archeology nerd. So when I first saw an notice about Olson’s newest book, Empress of the Nile: the Daredevil Archeaologist* Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction, it was an automatic pre-order.** Empress of the Nile was also the first book…

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