📚Books of the Week📖
Red Arrow Across the Pacific:
The Thirty-Second Infantry Division during World War II
By Mark D. Van Ells, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York
PURCHASE BOOK 11/12/2024
The story of the renowned Thirty-Second "Red Arrow" Infantry Division: qNational Guard unit—which originated in Wisconsin and Michigan but soon evolved to include soldiers from California to New England—became one of the first US military units deployed overseas in World War II, eventually logging more combat hours than any other US Army division. Offers a cultural history of the Red Arrow's wartime experience, from its mobilization in 1940, to its deployment across New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippines, to its postwar occupation of Japan. Drawing from letters, memoirs, and interviews, Van Ells lets the soldiers speak for themselves, describing in their own words the terror of combat, their impressions of foreign lands, the struggle to maintain their own humanity, and the many ways the war profoundly changed them.
1942: Crux of War
By Jonathan Parshall, Lecturer,
US Naval War College
PURCHASE BOOK 6/18/2026
By the end of 1942 there had been a sea-change in the conduct of WWII. Within just one 40-day timespan, the British had triumphed over Rommel at Alamein; British and American forces landed in North Africa to confront the Axis position there; the Americans won two naval battles at Guadalcanal, sealing the fate of that campaign and with it Japanese expansionism; the Red Army launched a massive counter-offensive at Stalingrad that would condemn six Axis armies-and hundreds of thousands of German, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian soldiers-to eventual destruction. The Allies had somehow gained the upper hand, forcing the Axis powers into a defensive crouch from which they would not rebound. The war, in short, had turned.
Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail
By Mark Leonard, Co-founder and Director,
European Council on Foreign Relations
PURCHASE BOOK 6/23/2026
Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next – from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions – the old rules of global order are collapsing. Leonard reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of 'Un-Order', where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics.
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They are simply new and interesting.
