Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

  Title: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest Author:  Wade Davis, read by Enn Reitel Publication Info: Random House Audio, 2011, 29 hours. Original hardback, Knopf Canada, 2011, 672 pages. Source: Library (Overdrive) Publisher's Blurb: If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of th...

Title: We Also Served: The Forgotten Women of the First World War Author: Vivien Newman Publication Info: Pen and Sword Books, 2014. 224 pages Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Blurb: We Also Served is a social history of women s involvement in the First World War. Dr Vivien Newman disturbs myths and preconceptions surrounding women's war work and seeks to inform contemporary readers of countless acts of derring-do, determination, and quiet heroism by British women, that went on behind the scenes from 1914-1918. In August 1914 a mere 640 women had a clearly defined wartime role. Ignoring early War Office advice to 'go home and sit still', by 1918 hundreds of thousands of women from all corners of the world had lent their individual wills and collective strength to the Allied cause. As well as becoming nurses, munitions workers, and members of the Land Army, women were also ambulance drivers and surgeons; they served with the Armed Forces; funded a...

  Title: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes Author: Adam Hochschild. Read by Lisa Flanagan Publishing Info: HMH Audio, 2020. Original, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 320 pages. Publisher's Blurb:   Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment worke...

  Title: Women Heroes of World War I: 16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies, and Medics Author: Katheryn J. Atwood Publication Info: Chicago Review Press, 2014. 256 pages (hardcover) Source: Library digital resources Publisher’s Blurb: In time for the 2014 centennial of the start of the Great War, this book brings to life the brave and often surprising exploits of 16 fascinating women from around the world who served their countries at a time when most of them didn’t even have the right to vote. Readers meet 17-year-old Frenchwoman Emilienne Moreau, who assisted the Allies as a guide and set up a first-aid post in her home to attend to the wounded; Russian peasant Maria Bochkareva, who joined the Imperial Russian Army by securing the personal permission of Tsar Nicholas II, was twice wounded in battle and decorated for bravery, and created and led the all-women combat unit the “Women’s Battalion of Death” on the Eastern Front; and American journalist Madeleine Zabrisk...

  Title: An Impartial Witness   (Bess Crawford Mysteries #2) Author: Charles Todd. Read by Rosalyn Landor Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America, 2010. Hardback published by William Morrow, 2010, 352 pages. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Blurb: It is early summer 1917. Bess Crawford has returned to England from the trenches of France with a convoy of severely wounded men. One of her patients is a young pilot who has been burned beyond recognition, and who clings to life and the photo of his wife pinned to his tunic. While passing through a London train station, Bess notices a woman bidding an emotional farewell to an officer, her grief heart-wrenching. And then Bess realizes that she seems familiar. In fact, she's the woman in the pilot's photo, but the man she is seeing off is not her husband. Back on duty in France, Bess discovers a newspaper with a drawing of the woman's face on the front page. Accompanying the drawing is a plea from Scotland Yar...

  Title: Goodbye Piccadilly Author: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Publisher: Sphere, 2014. 392 pages Source: Library Publisher's Summary: In 1914, Britain faces a new kind of war. For Edward and Beatrice Hunter, their children, servants and neighbours, life will never be the same again. For David, the eldest, war means a chance to do something noble; but enlisting will break his mother's heart. His sister Diana, nineteen and beautiful, longs for marriage. She has her heart set on Charles Wroughton, son of Earl Wroughton, but Charles will never be allowed to marry a banker's daughter. Below stairs, Cook and Ada, the head housemaid, grow more terrified of German invasion with every newspaper atrocity story. Ethel, under housemaid, can't help herself when it comes to men and now soldiers add to the temptation; yet there's more to this flighty girl than meets the eye. The once-tranquil village of Northcote reels under an influx of khaki volunteers, wounded soldiers ...

  Title: The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and their Forgotten World War Author: Richard Rubin; read by Grover Gardner Publisher: Blackstone Audio, 2013. Hardcover by Houghton Mifflen, 2013. 528 pages. Source: Library digital resources Publisher's Summary: In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, it took Richard Rubin months to find just one living American veteran of World War I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually he managed to find dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interview them. All are gone now. A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led Rubin across the United States and France, through archives, private collections, and battlefields, literature, propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all were the last of the last, the men and women he met: a new immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was saved by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every maj...

Title: The Summer Before the War   Author: Helen Simonson; read by Fiona Hardingham Publisher: Random House Audio, 2016 (original hardback by Random House, 2016, 496 pages). Source: Library digital services Publisher's Blurb: East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes ...

  Title: A Pinch of Poison (A Lady & Lady's Maid Mystery, #2) Author: Alyssa Maxwell Publisher: Kensington, expected release Jan. 2017. 304 pages Source: Electronic ARC from publisher in exchange for my honest review   Publisher's Blurb: In post–World War I England, Lady Phoebe Renshaw and her lady’s maid, Eva Huntford, encounter an uncharitable killer at a charity luncheon sponsored by a posh school for girls . . . Good deeds build good character, and good character is what the Haverleigh School for Young Ladies is all about. Lady Phoebe—with the tireless assistance of Eva—has organized a luncheon at the school to benefit wounded veterans of the Great War, encouraging the students to participate in the cooking and the baking. But too many cooks do more than spoil the broth—they add up to a recipe for disaster when the school’s headmistress, Miss Finch, is poisoned. The girls at Haverleigh all come from highly respected families, none of whom will countenance ...

Title: A Duty to the Dead (Bess Crawford Mysteries #1) Author: Charles Todd. Read by Rosalyn Landor Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America, 2009. Original publisher, William Morrow, 2009. 336 pages. Source: Library digital collection. Publisher's Summary: Charles Todd, author of the resoundingly acclaimed Ian Rutledge crime novels (“One of the best historical series being written today” — Washington Post Book World ) debuts an exceptional new protagonist, World War I nurse Bess Crawford, in A Duty to the Dead. A gripping tale of perilous obligations and dark family secrets in the shadows of a nightmarish time of global conflict, A Duty to the Dead is rich in suspense, surprise, and the impeccable period atmosphere that has become a Charles Todd trademark.   My Review: Note: I recently reviewed The Shattered Tree , the 8th book in the series. In that case, I was given an ARC in order to write my review. I enjoyed it enough to go back and start the series at the beginning, and found ...

Today we have another Great Escapes Blog tour, a mystery set among the violence and chaos of WWI. Title: The Shattered Tree Author: Charles Todd Publisher: William Morrow, 2016. 290 pages. Source: Publisher's ARC through Great Escapes Tours  Publisher's Summary:  At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher-bearers find an exhausted officer, shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is, the officer isn’t British—he’s French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German. When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussia...

I apologize for the lack of a cover photo--I'm on the road and my antique laptop wouldn't cooperate! Title: As I Saw it in the Trenches: Memoir of a Doughboy in World War I Author: Dae Hinson Publisher: McFarland & Company, 2015. 177 pages. Source: Library Summary:  This is the memoir of a WWI soldier, written down by him sometime in the years after the war, and discovered and transcribed by his nephew decades later. Hinson's goal seems simply to have been the accurate description of his WWI experiences. It is full of details about the war as he lived it. Review: This book reads very much as what it is: the account of a person who was not a professional writer, but a good observer and who obviously put a lot of effort into his narration. The editors have had the sense to leave it alone and not try to polish it up, and there are some places where errors slipped in or bits are missing, but the whole makes sense and it maintains the author's voice. The result is a ve...

Well, here it is again--another week, another rush to finish my story in time to revise it for you! Chuck Wendig gave us two lists of words or phrases this week, to be randomly selected and turned into a title. Being a bit lazy, instead of opening my random number generator, I asked my son for two numbers between one and 20. His choices gave me "Pegasus" and "Intelligence." As is often the case when starting from the title, it gives the idea and then the story moves on so the fit is no longer perfect. But a tale's a tale for all that. I hearby give you, in 1001 words... The Intelligence of Pegasus  “We’re operating blind, that’s the hell of it!” The captain glanced at the hills that prevented his scouts from watching the enemy. “So you’ll let me go up?” The young lieutenant was practically panting with eagerness to show what he could do with his new-fangled machine. Captain Carmichael-Jones caressed horse that looked over his shoulder, and scowled at the mess of...