Book Cover with Photographs of Frank Howley

Berlin Command by General Frank L. Howley

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to  an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file  in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

The New York Times did not love Berlin Command by General Frank L. Howley. The Times suggested that Howley was a little full of himself. It did not like his arguments with his superiors, and his criticisms of other officials involved in the Berlin Airlift. I disagree with the Times. I enjoyed the narrative. It was energetic and straightforward, if at times a little opinionated. But General Howley had the right to take some of the credit for the success of the Airlift.

He was the military manager of the American sector of Berlin. With the airlift of food and coal from West Germany to Berlin, he and his colleagues rescued the over 2 million people in the Allied sectors of Berlin from lives under Soviet tyranny after the Russians had stopped road, rail, and waterway traffic to Berlin in 1948 and 1949.

I would suggest that you advise your students to skip most of the first chapters where Howley talks about the division and administration of Germany before the airlift was necessary. I think that Howley produced an interesting introduction to the Cold War. He shows how the distrust between the U.S. and Russia came about. The tension created by the Berlin Airlift influenced American politicians and military leaders for decades.

The grade level is 10.3.

Book Cover of Last Enemy

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary

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The classic memoir that explodes the myth of the romance of war.

Young Richard Hillary, a Spitfire pilot in the RAF, thought that flying one-on-one against Hitler’s “roster of rogues” the Luftwaffe, would be exciting, gallant, and heroic.

However, when he is shot down, horribly burned and disfigured in the Battle of Britain, he faces a different battle in which he must confront the toughest enemy of all—himself—and learn true courage and heroism.

“Hillary takes us into the clouds of his flight-and into the depths of his suffering.”—Publishers Weekly
“FEW BOOKS ARE WRITTEN SO WELL OR PACK SUCH AN EMOTIONAL WALLOP.—UPI

More Editorial Reviews

“A small masterpiece” —The New York Times

“A classic of air warfare” —Washington Post

“Admirable skill … A real writer.” —J. B. Priestly

“A war book that is destined to live … It will, I think, become a Classic.”
—from a BBC broadcast by Sir Desmond MacCarthy

“A haunting memoir of wartime courage”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“THE LAST ENEMY has been a classic in England since its publication. It deserves the same status here.” —Tulsa World

“A philosophical treatise on war which ranks with the
best.” —Montgomery Journal-Advertiser

Cover with Soldier with Rifle

The Road to Stalingrad by Benno Zieser

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to  an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file  in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

 

On the last day of January, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad. After a winter cam­paign of unparalleled horror and hardship, the Wehrmacht was beaten.

THE ROAD TO STALINGRAD is a shattering eyewitness account of that lost battle-written by a survivor. Benno Zieser was drafted at the age of nineteen and fought in the infantry at Stalingrad, in this book he tells of his first naive enthusiasm—then the shocking realities:

The frozen wastes of an unconquerable continent . . . gutted roads strewn with abandoned equipment . . . the anonymous graves by the wayside . . . the colossal fraud behind Hitler’s promise of victory.

Not since ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT has a German author written such a powerful indictment of war—but Benno Zieser’s book is fact, not fiction.

So Big by Edna Ferber

So Big by Edna Ferber

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Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber’s crowning achievement. A rollicking panorama of Chicago’s high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler’s daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges. This is the stunning and unforgettable “novel to read and to remember” by an author who “critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call the greatest American woman novelist of her day” (New York Times).

So Big is a brilliant literary masterwork from one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished and admired writers, and still resonates today with its unflinching views of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success.

Launching Plane at Kitty Hawk

here

To read this ebook on a computer, or tablet using Calibre, or Google Play Books, or iBooks on your iPad, download this epub format.

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Directions on how to email this file to your Kindle device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.

With Calibre, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the reading experience on a computer screen is reasonable. On Chromebooks, the operating system will offer an ereading app when you open the epub file.

 

In this fascinating, highly readable biography, Fred C. Kelly, a former newspaperman, author, and an old friend of the Wrights, tells the story of the two brilliant, dedicated, flight-obsessed bicycle mechanics from Ohio who first realized mankind’s age-old dream of conquering the skies.

Long considered the definitive Wright biography (the manuscript was read and approved by Orville Wright), this book recounts the Wrights’ small-town boyhood, their early interest in all things mechanical, the establishment of the Wright Cycle Shop, and the complete behind-the-scenes story of how they designed, built, tested, and flew (December 1903) the first “Flyer.”

Enhanced with sixteen rare photographs, Mr. Kelly’s engaging account avoids minute technical description, yet describes simply and clearly the technological innovations that enabled the two brothers to succeed where so many others had failed. Anyone interested in the mechanics of flight or early aviation will find this volume a splendid introduction to the Wright brothers and their epochal achievement.

Grade level from a sample of four chapters in the Flesch-Kincaid analysis is 10.3.

Cover of the Wounded Don't Cry

The Wounded Don’t Cry by Quentin Reynolds

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this website to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

An Excerpt from the New York Times Review of January 26, 1941:

“THE WOUNDED DON’T CRY” is one of the phrases in which an American journalist expresses his admiration for British spirit, and more specifically the spirit of London under fire. In the book to which he has given that symbolic title (and which he dedicates To my neighbors, the people of London”) Quentin Reynolds has made an excellent selection of representative word pictures, which show in one clear-cut detail after another what England is going through and how English courage, endurance and humor are meeting the present happenings of war. It is a journalist’s book from start to finish, a book of flashes, sharp, racy, significant: one of the very good books of its kind…

…But for all the brightness with which he says it, most of what his book has to say is serious stuff.

At an R. A. F. airdrome as the men go out and come back (the lad they call “Old Brownie” is just 23; on a trawler in Channel convoy; in an aircraft factory; with friends in their country home; on the streets, and in many pubs—this Is the England Quentin Reynolds knows…

…For the French soldiers and airmen, with whom he was first stationed, Mr. Reynolds has also words of glowing admiration. He has a report from neutral Ireland too. But the best of his book is in its pictures from England — unconquered, undiscouraged, still laughing, not even tired.

“A lot of us think England won the war at Dunkerque,” he says. But why Hitler allowed the country to catch its breath then, instead of invading when he could, will always be a mystery.