The Book Thieves

Ceremonial book burnings and the theft of precious art works are well-known elements of Nazi Germany’s rampage through Europe. In The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Swedish journalist Anders Rydell tells the less familiar story of how two Nazi agencies—the intelligence wing of the…

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Pippi Longstocking Goes to War

(Okay, I admit it.  That’s an inaccurate, click-bait of a title.) Today Astrid Lindgren is famous as the creator of Pippi Longstocking:  the red-headed quirky rebel who proclaimed herself the strongest girl in the world.*  In World War II, Lindgren was a 30-something housewife and aspiring author.  Her war diaries, published posthumously in Sweden and…

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A Good Place to Hide

In A Good Place To Hide: How One French Village Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, Peter Grose describes how a population with its own experience of religious persecution and two charismatic pastors with unlikely international connections turned isolated community in the upper Loire Valley into a haven for Jews and other refugees…

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