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  The Hidden Legacy of World War II

  Carol Schultz Vento

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  Carol Schultz Vento recounts the post-World War II years of her famous father "Dutch" Schultz. 
  "Carol Schultz Vento's testimonial and others like it do not diminish the wartime generation's accomplishments but suggest that the price they paid was far higher, the toll extracted from them and their families far greater, and their struggles far more protracted than the glossy tributes to the 'Greatest Generation' would have us believe. It in is the end a cautionary tale, reminding us that if as a last resort we send soldiers into harm's way, we should be under no illusions about war's colossal human costs, remembering that even in the most brilliant triumphs there is heartbreak and that the suffering does not stop when the shooting does." --- Thomas Childers 
  Daughters, fathers and war - three words seldom used together. 
  In "The Hidden Legacy of World War II: A Daughter's Journey", Carol Schultz Vento weaves life with her paratrooper father into the larger narrative of World War II and the homecoming of the Greatest Generation. The book describes the seldom told story of how the war trauma of World War II impacted one family. This personal story is combined with the author's thorough research and investigation of the reality for those World War II veterans who could not forget the horrors of war. This nonfiction work fills in the missing pieces of the commonly accepted societal view of World War II veterans as stoic and unwavering, a true but incomplete portrait of that generation of warrior. About the author: Carol Schultz Vento is a former Political Science professor and attorney. She is a graduate of Temple University and Rutgers University School of Law. She is the daughter of 82nd Airborne World War II veteran Arthur "Dutch" Schultz. Carol is a native of Philadelphia and lives in Palmyra, New Jersey.

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  Brian Little - A Little Is Enough

  Simon Goodyear

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  On leaving school in 1969, Brian signed as an apprentice for Aston Villa who had just been relegated to the Third Division for the first and only time in their history. He made his senior debut on 30 October 1971, in a 4 – 1 win over Blackburn Rovers at Villa Park. In that same season, he also helped Villa win the FA Youth Cup. He was part of Villa's League Cup winning teams of 1975 and 1977 and scored two goals in the second replay victory over Everton in the 1977 final. Brian helped the club climb from the Third to First Division in the early part of the decade, scoring 20 league goals in the 1974 – 1975 season when they were runners-up and clinched promotion to the First Division. His starring roles earned him his first (and only) cap for the full England team in a substitute appearance against Wales at Wembley in May 1975.
  By the 1979 – 1980 season, Brian was a regular in the Villa side, but one year later, just before Villa's victorious 1980 – 1981 season, his career ended prematurely because of a knee injury, after making 302 appearances for his one and only club, scoring 82 goals in all competitions and having a clean disciplinary record to boot.
  Although his playing career was over, Brian remained on the Aston Villa payroll as youth team coach. When manager Tony Barton was sacked in the summer of 1984, Little's contract was also terminated and he became first-team coach of Wolverhampton Wanderers, before embarking on a hugely successful managerial career.
  Brian Little will be known as a flamboyant forward who formed a particularly prolific partnership with John Deehan and Andy Gray. He is regarded as an all-time great at Villa Park, and in 2007 he was named as one of the 12 founder members of the Aston Villa Hall of Fame.

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  Mission to South Africa - Diary...

  Robin Renwick

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  An insider's blow-by-blow account of the release of Nelson Mandela and dismantling of apartheid by the ambassador who was in the midst of these events. Appointed to South Africa as Margaret Thatcher's envoy, Lord Renwick became a personal friend of Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Mangosuthu Buthelezi, acting as a trusted intermediary between them. He describes meetings with PW Botha, warning him against military attacks on neighbouring countries and arguing for the lives of the Sharpeville Six, as 'like visiting Hitler in his bunker'. He persuaded Margaret Thatcher to descend on Windhoek in support of the Namibia agreement. His close relationship with FW de Klerk helped him to get international support for his reforms. On the eve of his epoch-making speech to Parliament of 2 February 1990, De Klerk told him: 'You can tell your Prime Minister she will not be disappointed'. He paints a vivid portrait of Mandela ('far wilier, and a bit less saintly than others have portrayed him'), describing his meetings with him immediately after his release, inviting him to his first meal in a restaurant in Johannesburg for 27 years, rehearsing him for his meeting with Margaret Thatcher - and telling Thatcher that she must not interrupt him! The iron lady warmed to her visitor, but told him to 'stop all this nonsense about nationalisation'. The Mandela charm worked no less effectively on the Queen, who he took to calling 'Elizabeth' and persuaded to dance with him in the royal box in the Albert Hall.

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  The Search - The life of a...

  Paul Besley

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  Coming from a working-class background, Paul Besley knew the worst and best of life in a Yorkshire steel town. He had always been drawn to the solitude of the hills, but that life nearly ended when a fall while hillwalking left him critically injured and alone in the mountains of the Lake District. Paul was found and brought to safety by a mountain rescue team. This was the trigger for him to transform his life, first by joining his local team, then by finding Scout, his very own Border collie puppy, and training him to become a mountain rescue search dog.
  In The Search, Paul writes with humour and honesty as we follow him and Scout through their complex training, with searches and rescue incidents sometimes tragic and often funny. Paul's demons and headstrong characters threaten to derail them, until his past finally catches up with him and his life inescapably unravels. It's up to Scout to keep an eye on him now as Paul tries to build the best life he can.

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  Roots Schmoots - Journeys Among...

  Howard Jacobson

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  From a Booker Prize-winning author, an “informed and witty” travelogue exploring America, Israel, Lithuania, and the nature of Jewish identity (Publishers Weekly).   Howard Jacobson had been hoping to make a journey to Lithuania to search for his Jewish roots. So when the BBC offered to send him around the globe to report on a variety of Jewish communities, he accepted. The trip he recounts in this memoir takes him to New York City, where tension simmers between Jews and African Americans; to California, where he visits a gay synagogue; to Israel, where he encounters the spectrum of Jewishness from Orthodox right-wing hardliners to tolerant, peace-loving kibbutzniks. And ultimately, to Lithuania, the land of his forefathers, where he discovers that antisemitism still lurks.   “A lively, irreverent but ultimately serious account of a British Jew’s search for his roots.” —Elizabeth Benedict, The New York Times   “Profound and moving.” —Publishers Weekly

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  The Annals of a Country Doctor

  MD Carl Matlock

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  Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a country doctor in solo practice in the decade of the seventies—making house calls, delivering babies, comforting the dying, offering hope to the hopeless, meeting delightful and sometimes eccentric patients, and working sixty to eighty hours per week, often exhausted and in need of rest? If so, follow me as I work in a small town office and make hospital rounds in rural Indiana as a family physician. You're unlikely to forget the experiences or regret the sharing.

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