"I enjoyed Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel so much I could hardly put it down. It ought to be widely read as an excellent way of recalling World War II." -Hans L. Trefousse Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History Brooklyn College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York "Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel paints an absorbing picture of the daily life of America's greatest generation. Vets will find themselves reliving their own experiences-the boredom, the loneliness, the fear, and the role of fate in life and death. For the rest of us, Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel is social history at its best." -Dr. Stanley J. Michalak Senior Associate, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia Professor Emeritus of Government, Franklin and Marshall College "A vivid story brought to realistic life." -Midwest Book Review "Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel delicately mixes fiction and history to tell the story of an American air corpsman during World War II. His precious letters enhance a grand book deserving warm appreciation. People from my hometown will be as moved and fascinated as many Americans who will, no doubt, eagerly read it." -Jacques Wynants, Belgian Historian Author of Verviers 1940 and Verviers Libéré PLOT SUMMARY On October 7, l942, Don Quix enlists in the Air Corps. He's slated to be an aerial gunner, but his flying dreams are shattered when he's caught AWOL with buddy Ken Jackson. Don manages to become a radio truck supervisor in a fighter control squadron while Ken goes to a demolition unit. As an army engineer, Ken barely survives D-Day on Normandy's "Bloody Omaha." During a baseball game in a French forest, Don moves his head slightly, saving himself from a sniper's bullet. Arriving in Verviers, Belgium in September 1944, Don and his fellow radio men endure frequent buzz bomb attacks. Due to a miscalculation in army strategy, they find themselves on the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Don's reunion with Ken, now a tech sergeant with a bomb disposal outfit, is marred by tragedy, dampening Don's torrid love affair with beautiful seamstress Denise Vervier. Denise's husband, sent to a forced labor camp in 1940, is presumed dead. When he unexpectedly returns, Don and Denise face a heartbreaking choice.

There have been many remarkable women who served British Intelligence during the Second World War. One whose dubious claim to have worked for them is a fascinating tale involving three marriages – the first, to a spurious White Russian prince; the second to a playboy-turned-criminal involved in a major jewellery robbery in the heart of London’s Mayfair in the late 1930s. After the war she became romantically involved with a well-known British Fascist, but finally married another notorious criminal whom she had met earlier during the war. The descriptions variously ascribed to her ranged from ‘remarkable’ and ‘quite ravishing’ to ‘...a woman whose loose living would make her an object of shame on any farm-yard’. Until now, very little has been recorded about Stella Lonsdale’s life. She doesn’t even merit a mention in the two official histories of MI5, even though she managed to tie them up in knots for years. This book will explore the role this strange woman may or may not have played in working for British Intelligence, the French Deuxième Bureau, or the Abwehr – German military intelligence – during the Second World War, using her MI5 files as a primary source.

A family history told through letters, documents, and memories.

An illuminating account of the history-making friendship between RFK and the chief of staff to JFK—a bond built on shared ideals, but severed by tragedy. When they first met at Harvard in 1946, young Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell could not have imagined where their lives would take them. Teammates on both the football and debate teams, they formed a partnership that would sustain them through the years, from Robert Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general to O’Donnell’s years as John F. Kennedy’s chief of staff. Together they lived, worked, and struggled through some of the most pivotal moments of the twentieth century, including the assassination of JFK in Dallas. Their harmonious relationship was cut short only by Bobby’s own tragic death. With full access to the Kennedy family archives, Helen O’Donnell brings an inspiring personal and political alliance to life. With A Common Good, she amply fulfills the promise she made to her late father to honor and preserve his memories of Robert F. Kennedy for future generations. Kirkus Reviews hails A Common Good as “a moving and intimate study of a unique friendship but also of the time and place, now long ago, in which this friendship formed and blossomed.” O’Donnell “set out to write ‘a good book about two good men.’ In this she has succeeded.”