What are you reading or what have you read lately?

aside from romances which i'm sure you guys aren't interested in...
i like a lot of true crime and WW2 topics. a few authors that have me hooked are Gregg Olsen, Mark Sullivan, and Mitchell Zuckoff

Gregg does a lot of true crime. Sometimes he's writing based on 3rd party accounts of the crimes and official court documents so he does take a little liberty with details when there are gaps in the story but does stick to the facts as much as his research allows. I've read both "If You Tell" about a woman who physically/mentally abused her whole family - husband and daughters - as well as two of her friends. Crazy, sick story but it was one I couldn't put down. Also read "Cruel Deception" about a woman who was tried for child abuse via Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. Again, crazy crazy story. But he manages to build a book off of the court proceedings and testimonies and tells the stories from start to finish as if he had witnessed everything 1st hand. He has several others that I have queued up.

Mark does mainly fiction but he has a couple of historical biographies that I was hooked on - he also lives in my hometown. Beneath a Scarlet Sky about a young guy in Italy during WW2 who worked with the resistance and helped sneak Jewish refuges into Switzerland via the Italian side of the Alps. Kinda gets a little "too good/wild to be true" in some parts but its a good story. I do think that the gentleman embellished some of his tales a little bit when Mark interviewed him but he wrote what he was told. His other is The Last Green Valley about a local family's ancestors who survived being evacuated from Ukraine by the Nazis during WW2 and joined a wagon train of sorts across Europe to escape Stalin's Army and in the end the family came to Montana. Good story and the family contributed to a lot of what went into the book.

And Mitchell wrote 13 Hours in Benghazi which was amazing. He has other true life tales too - Lost In Shangri-La about a group of WAC's who were out for a sightseeing flight before they crash landed in Papau New Guinea towards the end of WW2. PNG was inhabited by native tribes at the time, completely untouched by the modern world. Several tribes were rumored to be cannibals. But they took in survivors and a massive rescue effort was launched. Amazing story all around. Another, both modern and WW2 related book of his is Frozen in Time about the search and recovery of an aircraft that crashed in Greenland during WW2. To deliver planes manufactured in the US to Europe during the war the planes were flown in shorter segments that took them up the eastern seaboard, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland and down to England. The book covers the crash of a fleet of planes, the failed rescue attempts to get the crew members (several by land, see and air) and the eventual recovery of one of the crashed planes that took place in the 1990's. Amazing story that spans decades and dozens of people but somehow he's able to tell the story without being confusing.

 

I have not but his stuff looks good. Night have to add something to my list and see how it goes

i have not but i have seen the movie. crazy stuff if the movie shows even half of what the book entails!

started reading one author that wrote a sort of romance but based in the WW2 era and that lead to Amazon suggesting another author with more modern romance stuff and another. i try to mix it up little... modern happily ever after romance followed by a serial killer story followed by a WW2 fictional good overcomes evil followed by true life true life good over comes evil and then back around again.