Posts

Featured Post

Where History Comes Alive!!

Image
Explore the Great Cataclysms of the 20th Century! Any day, it seems, America will go to war with the rest of the Axis powers, and Mack worries what will happen to Inga, his love.  This summer, the last summer of peace for a long time, the couple make the most of their time together.  Soon enough, Inga's father is suspected of espionage for the Nazis and Inga and her family must flee.   Meanwhile, Mack and his high school friends get caught up in the faceless machinery of warfare.  Hot swing music and slow romance, men and women hurriedly marry before all is lost.  Find out what fate has for Mack and Inga's families in the celebrated novel:  In Love and War It is the summer of 1941, in central Florida, and Mack has found himself in a dilemma.  He has fallen hopelessly in love with Inga, his classmate, and she is set to move back to Germany with her family because the US government believes her father is a Nazi spy.  As the second world war unf...

The Battle of Gallipoli

  The Battle of Gallipoli   Mid-way through the First World War, the Allies found themselves fighting the Germans and Turks in a part of Turkey called Gallipoli.  There was a movie version devoted to this battle that was released in the early 1980s and it starred a very young Mel Gibson.  In fact, it was his break-out role around the same time as Mad Max was released.  The movie was the story of two young men, both excellent athletes, sprinters, in fact.  As I was a sprinter in the pool the first time I saw this movie (See my collection Swimming Among the Olympians, or look me up at the SwimSwam website:   https://swimswam.com/swimming- among-the-olympians-a-memoir/   ), I particularly related to the themes of boyhood friendship and fellow athletes going to war. As I remember, Gibson’s character and the other young man were two of the best sprinters in Australia at the time, and naturally, the commanders pick one of them to be a “runner” for ...

Background information on the "Lost Battalion"

Hey Readers! Here is some background information on the "Lost Battalion" the unit that the fictional Hyrum Fratelli fights in during World War I.  This is the backdrop for the first section of my new novel:  Contrition .   https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/hells-half-acre-true-story-lost-battalion-robert-laplander

An excerpt from my future novel

An excerpt from my future novel, Contrition Wartime London swirled with misty fog, grim and surreal, ghastly, a place for the dead and near dead to nestle in dark corners and shadows.   The city was what it looked like: a sepulcher town of ghosts and spirits, a haunted place.   A bleak, desolate place, devoid of vigor and covered from corner to corner with a torpor of the dead, newly dead and dead in spirit for time unmeasured.  Those not dead and haunting the city were ambulatory and horribly disabled.  Nearly all the men in the streets carried with them limbs maimed like those of ill-used toy soldiers and those who weren’t maimed seemed chastened and empty-eyed.  An unnatural amount of young women were dressed in black, heavy-lidded with blood-shot eyes, and by this stage in the war, in the late summer of 1918, the whole city seemed to be suffering from severe melancholia and exhaustion.   Everyone would simply whisper to no one in particul...