Here are 100 books that I'm Still Standing fans have personally recommended if you like
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As soon as I could read, my dad introduced me to the science fiction greats like Bradbury and Asimov. From there, I branched out to comics and fantasy. However, the tales that connected to me always had one thing in common: relatable characters. Whether it was the musing of Bradbury’s protagonists or the Hulk’s desire to be left alone, they all resonated with me personally. As a science fiction and fantasy author, it’s my job to make that same connection. Instead of escaping into imaginary realms, I have to figure out how to better observe the real world so I can tell better stories.
This book took me on a journey with a group of unlikely heroes, starting with their decision to enlist to fight in the war, following them through their training as paratroopers, and ending the conflict. Like many World War II veterans, they were volunteers. But the anticipation leading up to D-Day and the hell they went through in the woods of Bastogne was more than anyone could have ever expected.
Few histories of World War II hit me as hard as this one. As a child of the 1960s and 1970s, the war has always fascinated me. I’d read about the strategy, the epic battles, and the atrocities committed by the Axis Powers, but I’ve returned to this book many times over the past thirty years.
They fought on Utah Beach, in Arnhem, Bastogne, the Bulge; they spearheaded the Rhine offensive and took possession of Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden. Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, was as good a rifle company as any in the world. From their rigorous training in Georgia in 1942 to D-Day and victory, Ambrose tells the story of this remarkable company, which kept getting the tough assignments. Easy Company was responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. BAND OF BROTHERS is the account of the men of…
The night before my dear friend Gina faced a delicate surgery that could have left her paralyzed from the waist down, she handed me a ziplock bag containing yellowed letters dating back to World War II. “No matter what happens to me, I want you to tell Bud’s story,” she said. “Promise me!” And so I did. What followed was a deep dive into what had happened to Gina’s uncle, Sergeant Bud Richardville, a young man drafted into the Army as the U.S. prepared to enter the war in Europe.
If you are looking for a traditional war novel, Dalton Trombo’s 1938 masterpiece is not it. The World War I tale of American Joe Bonham is a horror story, a gruesome, disturbing, anti-war novel told from Bonham’s point of view as he lies in a hospital bed after being wounded by a shell.
But wounded doesn’t actually explain his situation. Bonham’s arms and legs are gone. He is also blind and deaf, and his face is missing. No eyes, ears, tongue, nose, or teeth. All he can do is think. He recalls his life before the war: his first girlfriend, best friend Bill, and his parents, but the past is soon replaced by the terror of his new life.
Understandably, Joe decides that he wants to die. He tries to kill himself in various ways, but studious nurses keep rescuing him. One scene, where a new nurse pulls back his…
“Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury accounting to eloquence.”—The New York Times
This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered—not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. . . . This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome . . . but so is war.
The night before my dear friend Gina faced a delicate surgery that could have left her paralyzed from the waist down, she handed me a ziplock bag containing yellowed letters dating back to World War II. “No matter what happens to me, I want you to tell Bud’s story,” she said. “Promise me!” And so I did. What followed was a deep dive into what had happened to Gina’s uncle, Sergeant Bud Richardville, a young man drafted into the Army as the U.S. prepared to enter the war in Europe.
Once upon a time, war was portrayed as glorious. Smartly-dressed soldiers strutted off to battle as admiring crowds cheered their departure. But then came Erich Maria Remarque’s stunning semi-autographical rebuke. Remarque was conscripted into the Imperial German Army at 18 and was wounded in the poisonous trenches of World War I. While he survived, like many, he did not return home unscathed.
This book centers around young Paul Bäumer, an idealistic German boy raised in a picturesque village where patriotic speeches in school romanticize war and urge young men to sign up and fight for the Fatherland. He and his friends do just that and soon find themselves mired in the horrific conditions of trench warfare, a new kind of battle where little ground is ever made, and men die in all sorts of miserable ways.
As Paul and his peers struggle to do their duty, they succumb physically and…
The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war; under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war - of any war - told for a whole generation of victims.
I love reading stories that are a good mix of reality and fantasy, just as much as I like to write them myself. And I guess that comes from my background as a journalist. But perhaps not so, as the first stories I wrote in my teens that were published in a Dutch women’s magazine were retellings of Biblical stories. I recounted those from the point of view of women: the (future) wives of Joseph (with the ten brothers) and of Moses. I was a writer long before I became a journalist, a profession I needed to gather the knowledge I could then use to write my books, so it seems.
I loved to read about the women who went to Vietnam, mostly as nurses, to treat the many wounded Americans fighting there. They are a forgotten category. The main character, Frankie, did not exist, but the writer based her on several nurses she spoke to.
I use that way of working myself, too: I make up characters and put them in what looks very much like reality. Hanah showed how powerful trauma is and how it changes lives, which is another theme of mine. She really made me love Frankie.
From master storyteller Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds, comes the story of a turbulent, transformative era in America: the 1960s. The Women is that rarest of novels—at once an intimate portrait of a woman coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided by war and broken by politics, of a generation both fueled by dreams and lost on the battlefield.
“Women can be heroes, too.”
When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these unexpected…
The relationship between servicewomen and the US military is a complicated one. It’s love, strength, comradery, and also abuse, manipulation, sexual harassment, and soul-crushing institutional betrayal. After leaving the military, I found most books or movies didn’t adequately represent this complex relationship, either ignoring the abuse altogether, or focusing too much on it and erasing the bravery and resilience of women service members. I strive to write books that better represent this conflicting relationship, and I hope this book list helps better reflect women’s experiences in the US military.
Helen Benedict’s book chronicles the lives of several women serving in Iraq. It is searing and appropriately disturbing. These are stories told by the women themselves, which range from harassment, rape, or manipulation from fellow soldiers and command to the devastating medical issues and battles with the VA afterward. This collection shows that often women’s greatest enemies in wartime are not on the other side of the gate but instead inside the camp with her. While the book does focus single-mindedly on abuse in the military, there’s no denying that these women’s stories are real, poignant, and deserve to be heard.
The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone.
More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female…
I have studied WW2 and prisoners of war during that period for more than 20 years. They're very much the forgotten soldiers of war in my opinion. Few spoke of their treatment and brutality at the hands of the enemy, starvation, and the psychological effects that they lived with for many years afterward. Marriages fell apart, alcoholism was commonplace and many committed suicide, during a time where the term PTSD hadn't been invented. I've selected books that tell the story from several different perspectives. There were good and bad on all sides and for every ten stories of brutality and murder, there were another ten stories of good men and women who did their best to help the POWs survive.
Not a subject often written about and sometimes we forget that the Allies held POWs too. A fascinating insight into German POWS held on UK soil helped me with another one of my collaborations, the book, The Psychiatrist by John West.
Very well researched and written, at times sad, other times very moving, and some nice tales which reflect the old adage that all wars are futile. One arrives at the clear conclusion that young German men were no different to our own boys, except those who took on the Nazi propaganda and believed it until the bitter end.
After the Second World War, 400,000 German servicemen were imprisoned on British soil, some remaining until 1948. These defeated men in their tattered uniforms were, in every sense, Hitler's Last Army. Britain used the prisoners as an essential labour force, especially in agriculture, and in the devastating winter of 1947 the Germans helped avert a national disaster by clearing snow and stemming floods, working shoulder to shoulder with Allied troops.
Slowly, friendships were forged between former enemies. Some POWs fell in love with British women, though such relationships were often frowned upon: `Falling pregnant outside marriage was bad enough -…
My father was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore on the 15th of February 1942. He spent three and a half years slaving on the Thai Burma railway. During my early years growing up, my father rarely talked about his experiences, and it wasn't until after he died in 1990 that I became interested in what he went through as a prisoner of war. Since then, I've spent my time researching the Japanese prisoner of war experiences and have read countless books on the subject. I myself have published four books and I consider myself one of the leading experts on the Japanese prisoner of war experience.
Judy was a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only official animal POW of World War 2 truly was a dog in a million. Whether she was dragging men to safety from the wreckage of a torpedoed chip or scavenging food for the starving inmates of a hellish Japanese prisoner of war camp, her unbreakable spirit brought inspiration and hope to men living through the 20th century's darkest days during their captivity. Judy's uncanny ability to sense danger matched with her quick thinking and impossible daring saved countless lives. She was a close companion to those who became like a family to her, sharing in both the tragedies and joys they faced. Her incredible story based here on the testimonies of the last few veterans who knew her is one of the most heartwarming and inspiring tales you will ever read.
The impossibly moving story of how Judy, World War Two's only animal POW, brought hope in the midst of hell.
Judy, a beautiful liver and white English pointer, and the only animal POW of WWII, truly was a dog in a million, cherished and adored by the British, Australian, American and other Allied servicemen who fought to survive alongside her.
Viewed largely as human by those who shared her extraordinary life, Judy's uncanny ability to sense danger, matched with her quick-thinking and impossible daring saved countless lives. She was a close companion to men who became like a family to…
My father was a pilot in WW2 and I learned to fly in Africa when I was 17. Subsequently I flew biplanes, some of them like the ones in these books, made of wood, glue, and fabric. Since childhood, I've been fascinated by flying in WW1. It was a time of incredible change. The dawn of aviation, when designers and pilots barely understood what they were doing. Biographies written at the time are typically laconic, “emotionally repressed” might be modern. So these novels help us understand today some of those stresses and joys of these remarkable adventurers who dared to undertake what mankind had never done before; fight in the heavens.
Johns wrote nearly 100 Biggles books, with this one published amongst the first in 1932. He actually fought in WW1 as a pilot, then was shot down, and became a prisoner of war. So he certainly knows whereof he speaks, and this carries through in his descriptions of fighting in the air and the loss of friends. Nevertheless, this book is essentially light-hearted despite its moments of pathos, being aimed primarily at what would be called today “young adults.” I loved them as a boy and love them today as an adult. The plot and characters are not complex, but if you want to be entertained while finding out how a pilot who fought in the conflict approached WW1 flying, this is an excellent and enjoyable read by someone who was there.
The Civil War has been a passion of mine since I was seven years old. This was inflamed by a professor I met at SUNY Cortland—Ellis Johnson, who first told me of the POW camp at Elmira, New York. Even though I grew up just thirty miles from Elmira I was astounded at this revelation. Later I learned that I had a third great-grandfather—William B. Reese—who served in the Veterans Reserve Corps after being wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and was assigned to the garrison in Elmira, where he may have stood guard over the very prison his great grandson would write about.
This authoritative book is the first comprehensive study of all major Civil War prisons—North and South. Speer traces the development of the POW facilities the various types used throughout the war from barren ground affairs to the infamous barren stockades—like Andersonville. We learn about the system of prisoner exchange created in the crisis and how it broke down, including how the taking of African-American prisoners ultimately spelled doom for the cartel. Speer traces the development of the POW facilities and the various types used throughout the war, from barren ground affairs to the infamous barren stockades—like Andersonville. This essential tool helps us categorize prisons by type, years they existed, capacity, escapes, and number of deaths.
The holding of prisoners of war has always been both a political and a military enterprise, yet the military prisons of the Civil War, which held more than four hundred thousand soldiers and caused the deaths of fifty-six thousand men, have been nearly forgotten. Now Lonnie R. Speer has brought to life the least-known men in the great struggle between the Union and the Confederacy, using their own words and observations as they endured a true "hell on earth." Drawing on scores of previously unpublished firsthand accounts, Portals to Hell presents the prisoners' experiences in great detail and from an…
My father, Squadron Leader Peter Stevens MC, died in 1979, when I was 22 years old, before I'd had the chance to speak with him man-to-man about his war. I later began researching his wartime exploits, which would consume a good part of 18 years of my life. I initially had no intention of writing a book; I just wanted to find the original document that recommended him for the Military Cross. I finally located it in Britain's National Archives in 2006. Along the way, I discovered that my father had actually been born a German Jew (he had told his immediate family in Canada that he was British and Anglican), and that some 15-20 family members had been murdered in the Holocaust. Further research showed that Dad had been the ONLY German-Jewish bomber pilot in the RAF, and that he had been the object of a country-wide manhunt by the British Police as a possible enemy spy.
This is the autobiography of the man I consider the most determined escaper of WW2. Jimmy James was a serial escaper. One of the 76 men who broke out of Stalag Luft 3 in The Great Escape, he was recaptured and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Using a spoon, he dug a tunnel and escaped from there! This is one of the bravest stories I've ever read of determination to succeed at any cost.
From the moment he was shot down to the final whistle, Jimmy James' one aim as a POW of the Germans was to escape.The Great Escaper describes his experiences and those of his fellow prisoners in the most gripping and thrilling manner. The author made more than 12 escape attempts including his participation in The Great Escape, where 50 of the 76 escapees were executed in cold blood on Hitler's orders.On re-capture, James was sent to the infamous Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where, undeterred, he tunnelled out. That was not the end of his remarkable story.Moonless Night has strong claim to…
