Central Skagit Library District

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

"The indomitable Kopp sisters are tested at home and aboard in this warm and witty tale of wartime courage and camaraderie"-- The U.S. has finally entered World War I. Constance Kopp is chasing down suspected German saboteurs and spies for the Bureau of Investigation while Fleurette is traveling across the country entertaining troops with song and dance. Meanwhile, at an undisclosed location in France, Norma is overseeing her thwarted pigeon project...

“Before the Greatest Generation, there was the Forgotten Generation of World War I . . . wonderfully engaging” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
 
“Richard Rubin has done something that will never be possible for anyone to do again. His interviews with the last American World War I veterans—who have all since died—bring to vivid life a cataclysm that changed our world...

France, 1914. Aurelie becomes trapped on the wrong side of the front with her father, Comte Sigismund de Courcelles. When the Germans move into their family's ancestral estate, Aurelie discovers she knows the German Major's aide de camp, Maximilian Von Sternburg. Betrayal will shatter them both. France, 1942. Raised by her American grandmother in the Hotel Ritz, Marguerite 'Daisy' Villon remains in Paris with her daughter and husband, a Nazi collaborator,...

"A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable." — Boston Globe

One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History)

Historian Christopher Clark's riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.

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The Campaign of Chancellorsville by Theodore Ayrault Dodge libreka classics — These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

"The Return of the Soldier" is British author Rebecca West's remarkable 1918 novel of the struggle of a World War I veteran and the three women who love him as he returns home and tries make sense of the life that he had before he went to war. Told from the perspective of his cousin Jenny, who lives with him and his wife Kitty, it is the story of British soldier Chris Baldry, who has just returned home from fighting in France. Chris has amnesia and...

World War I was a bloodletting so vast and unprecedented that for a generation it was known simply as the Great War. Casualty lists reached unimagined proportions as the same ground -- places like Ypres and the Somme -- was fought over again and again. Other major bloody battles remain vivid in memory to this day: Gallipoli and the Battle of Jutland are but two examples. Europe was at war with itself, and the effect on Western civilization was profound,...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author comes an epic saga of intrigue and mystique set in Edwardian England. Cavendon Hall is home to two families, the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them. Charles Ingham, the sixth Earl of Mowbray, lives there with his wife Felicity and their six children. Walter Swann, the premier male of the Swann family, is valet to the earl. His wife Alice, a clever seamstress who is in charge of the countess's...

As the "Great War" inspired much great poetry, including that of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, so did it inspire compelling prose. John Dos Passos volunteered to drive an ambulance in France during the First World War. The brutality of his experiences turned him against not only war, but capitalism and inspired him to write One Man's Initiation: 1917.