When It Was Our War

When Stella Suberman wrote her first memoir, The Jew Store, at the age of seventy-six, she was widely praised for shedding light on a forgotten piece of American history--Jewish life in the rural South. In her new memoir, Suberman reveals yet another overlooked aspect of America's past--the domestic side of war. Her story begins in the Miami Beach she grew up in, when hotel signs boasted "Always a View, Never a Jew" and where a passenger ship lingered just off shore carrying hundreds of European Jews hoping for--but never finding--sanctuary. It was a time of innocence, before that war in Europe became our war. Stella was nineteen when America entered the fighting. By the time she was twenty-three, the war was over. She married Jack Suberman the week he enlisted and set out alone to join him in California. She was kicked off trains to make room for soldiers, her luggage was stolen, she was arrested for soliciting, but she was determined to follow her husband. And she did so for the next four years as he was sent from air base to air base, first training to be a bombardier and then training others. It wasn't until he was sent overseas to fly combat missions that she finally went back home to wait, as did so many other soldier's wives. This remarkable memoir renders a double understanding of war--of how it matured a young woman and how it matured a country. By personalizing the patriotism of the 1940s, Stella Suberman's story becomes the story of all military wives and serves as a powerful reminder of how differently many Americans feel about war sixty years later.

Accompanied by descriptive text, a compilation of 256 snapshots taken by soldiers on the ground in Iraq offer a personal record of the Iraq War and the experiences of Americans.

This is a modern day civil war novel with NO political blame. After years of questioning the reality of what has been happening in this nation, I have come to the conclusion that when war happens it will be because of WE THE PEOPLE. There is so much division being pushed today by our political leaders and Hollywood elites that the country is starting to break. Make no mistake about it, the divide they are pushing CAN BE avoided if WE THE PEOPLE would stop for even a moment to realize how brainwashed they are hoping we will become. This story is based on a twenty year long nightmare that I have had. The book is told in the first person, think of it in the terms of a dairy of a man on the ground when it all goes wrong.

"When It Was Our War is a personal story that brings a new perspective to "the greatest generation" by giving voice to the military wives on America's home front during World War II." "Still a teenager when America declared war on Germany and Japan, Stella Suberman, not hesitating for even a moment, bought a blue Vera Maxwell suit and a leghorn hat made of fine straw, found a rabbi, and married Jack a week after he joined the Army Air Corps. By the time the war ended in 1945, Stella was twenty-three, and very much an adult. Now eighty, she tells her story - the story of a young woman who, like so many others, watched her husband go off to war overseas, not knowing if she would ever see him again and waiting for what seemed an eternity for his letters home." "In this frank, insightful record of those war years, Suberman takes us back to the Miami Beach of her high school days when hotel signs boasted Always A View, Never A Jew. She recalls the passenger ship lingering just off Miami Beach, a boat full of European Jews hoping for sanctuary and later known as the Voyage of the Damned. She describes setting forth alone across the country to join Jack at his training camp in California. Kicked off trains to make room for soldiers, her luggage stolen, arrested for "soliciting," she was determined to follow her husband. Stella discovered she could take on and handle hard things: the anti-Semitism she encountered almost everywhere, the gradual recognition of her own prejudice, and even having her first baby far from home. Meanwhile, she took Jack's buddies into her heart, and when some were lost in battle, she grieved, but went on."--BOOK JACKET.

David Harris was the most famous draft resister of the Vietnam War. A former student body president of Stanford University, he refused to accept induction and be sent to Vietnam. As a consequence, he spent nearly two years in a federal prison. With his marriage to Joan Baez, he emerged as the leading moral voice of his generation. For the past two decades, he has largely remained silent as the antiwar movement he led stood accused by critics and politicians of everything from cowardice to stab-in-the-back betrayal to frivolity. Now, in Our War, he speaks out in defense of a generation torn by one of the more divisive wars in America's history. Neither a history nor an autobiography, though containing aspects of both. Our War is a compelling, even fevered account of stalking the war's moral shadow through the decades since its ignominious end. It is a powerful rumination on the war, the protest movement, and America's need, even now, so many years later, for a reckoning. Our War is a one-of-a-kind look at who we were, what we did, why we did it, and what those actions made of us, seen through the eyes of a unique and significant American figure and one of our most gifted writers. Part memoir, part polemic, all passion. Our War is a disturbing book, a cry from the heart of an anguished American.

The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity, progress, and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic conflict that killed millions, bled its economies dry, shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined Europe’s dominance of the world. It was a war that could have been avoided up to the last moment—so why did it happen? Beginning in the early nineteenth century and ending with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, award-winning historian Margaret Macmillan uncovers the huge political and technological changes, national decisions, and just as important, the small moments of human muddle and weakness that led Europe from peace to disaster. This masterful exploration of how Europe chose its path towards war will change and enrich how we see this defining moment in history.

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

A veteran Canadian peacekeeper who served in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, Stéphane Grenier shares his journey to changing how workplaces deal with mental health.