100 books like Destination Unknown

I recommend this book because it gives a broader picture of the women who changed the way women participate in society forever. It wasn’t just building bombs, liberty ships, and planes that women had a part in. It was everything! When I’ve talked to women who lived during that time, and when I read this book, I realized how many ways women changed during that period of history.

Good friends stick together through thick and thin. That’s the premise I took away from The Beantown Girls. 

When one of three forever best friends from Boston learns that her fiancé is missing in WWII action, she determines to go to Europe and against all odds, find him. She convinces her two best friends—women with very different personalities, very different gifts, and skills—to join her as Red Cross Clubmobile girls in what could be a grand adventure or a terrible risk to their lives. 

They never expected to care so deeply for the soldiers they go to help, to encounter the horrors and deprivation of war they do, or that their friendship and camaraderie will be tested and yet become the thing that carries them through.

The authors spent ten years researching and acquiring the 30,000 letters that resulted in this collection portraying the wide range of experiences of women in uniform during World War II. I’ve returned to this book often during my research and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the role women played during the war. These eyewitness accounts of the day-to-day lives of ordinary women stepping up to do extraordinary things are compelling and inspirational.

My favorite thing about this book is that it contains copies of the actual letters sent home by Dorothy, about half handwritten and the other half typed. The accompanying photos and newspaper clippings enhance the narrative of her work and travel in England. This is one of the most complete sets of letters I’ve ever seen. Dorothy was the Red Cross secretary at a U.S. Army hospital located at a country estate (think Downton Abbey). I love her conversational tone, charming descriptions, and positive attitude. I almost felt like I was her mother reading the letters as they arrived so many years ago.  

Red Cross trainees were among the thousands of people who poured into Washington, D.C., during World War II, with Mary Brandon–in our book–arriving there for instruction in 1943. What was the city like?

Esteemed journalist David Brinkley shared his personal reminiscences of a 1940s-era Washington in this lively account, showing how the city morphed rapidly from a slow-moving Southern town into an initially ill-prepared wartime capital. Brinkley’s many anecdotes are amusing, astonishing, and always instructive, as when he noted that even though the army placed antiaircraft guns on roofs of government buildings, so few guns were available that some–it was later learned–were merely wood replicas.

Through Mary Brandon’s letters, I glimpsed wartime Washington. Brinkley’s book treated me to a full portrait.

I loved this novel, based on the author’s mother’s life!

It made me aware of American women called Donut Dollies and their roles in WW2 following the troops as they liberated Europe. I imagined being there and how it would be for the protagonist.

An unusual and heartbreaking story. The events experienced affected the author’s mother afterward all through her life, and she died isolated and alone. I recognized how a mother was affected by war, as my mother also was traumatized.

Rumer Godden is a favourite novelist of mine, but this is non-fiction. Godden was born in India and only left after Independence. Towards the end of World War Two, she made a long journey to document the work done by women volunteers in the Bengal region of India during the war, travelling huge distances, crossing many rivers, to remote places. The book, with photographs, includes the work of both European and Indian volunteers in a huge number of organizations, ranging from the Red Cross, hospital trains, and dispatch riders to the ARP and mobile canteens. Best of all are the descriptions Godden gives us in this wonderful book as she turns her novelist's eye on all these people and places of work and brings them all to life.

I lived in Rome for one summer, and am in love with the Eternal City. This book transported me not only to Rome but back to the wartime era, and I was gripped. I loved the poetic descriptions of the city and the surrounding countryside, and the characters were strong and believable. At the core of the novel is an agonising choice a young Jewish mother has to make, and the pain of that moment has stayed with me ever since. This novel is not only a joy to read but taught me more about what Italians went through during the Second World War. 

One of my favorite Italian figures of the twentieth century is the writer, painter, and anti-fascist Carlo Levi.

This collection of his essays, evoking the complexities of Rome and its people, sums up what it means to come to terms with the Eternal City:

“Here, everything has already existed: and existence has not vanished into memory, rather it has remained present... The virtues are not the moral and ideological values (which the passage of too long a time has gradually flattened out), but simpler and more visible values: health, physical strength, knowing how to eat and drink, knowing how to speak with a certain humor and brevity, knowing how to command respect, sincerity, friendship.”

May all roads lead to this understanding of the world. 

Morante’s classic novel about the impact on Rome of World War 2 and its aftermath had been on my TBR list for decades but I only got round to it during the first Covid lockdown. I couldn’t have found a more appropriate time.

It’s a novel about oppression, from without and within, laced with the fear of death and an overhanging sense of impotence. This all sounds pretty grim, and the novel certainly doesn’t pull any punches, but it’s also vivid, deeply touching and an extraordinary picture of a city under siege.

It’s particularly poignant for me because I read it while I was holed up in the district of San Lorenzo, one of the main settings of the novel and a place where the destruction wrought by WW2 can still be seen.