Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books I'd Recommend To My Husband

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My husband is a big into WWII fiction, books on history from WWII and the Cold War, and political thrillers. Here are ten (in no particular order) I would recommend to him if he ever had the time to read lately.

This is the second book in John Knoerle's American Spy Trilogy. It was the first book out of this series that I read and remains my favorite. I think the hubby would enjoy all three books, but this is the strongest one.

It's May 1946. America is enjoying its victory over the Germans. The OSS has been disbanded and the CIA is still more than a year away from being formed.

Former OSS agent Hal Schroeder is offered a job as a trade rep in Berlin. When he flies to meet his new boss in New York, he's shocked to come face-to-face with former OSS Chief Bill Donovan. Schroeder has no interest in being a spy.

When rumors swirl about the Red Army massing tanks along the Elbe in East Germany, and Hal ends up meeting a man from his past in Berlin, Hal's interests take a backseat to discovering the truth.

I already recommended this next one to the hubby right as soon as I was done reading it. I had the digital version, but he tends to read printed books, so I might pick up a copy of this one as a Christmas present this year.

The Germans are retreating as the Russians advance in Warsaw. Resistence fighters rise up against their Nazi oppressors, but the Germans retaliate, leveling the city. American Adam Nowak is dropped into Poland by British intelligence as an assassin. He has lost much, and has had to disengage himself from his past and all he's known to concentrate on his mission. But then he meets Natalia, a woman who has also lost much, he yearns to tap into the human part of himself he is sure must be left behind forever. Together they work to find a copy of the 1940 Soviet order that ordered the murders of 20,000 Polish Army officers and civilians.

This is another novel by Douglas Jacobson. I actually haven't read this one yet, but knowing how much I enjoyed The Katyn Order, I feel comfortable making the recommendation.

In 1939 the Germans invade Poland, setting off a rising storm of violence and destruction. For Anna and Jan Kopernik the loss is unimaginable. She is an assistant professor at a university in Krakow; he, an officer in the Polish cavalry. Separated by war, they must find their own way in a world where everything they ever knew is gone.

Anna’s father, a prominent intellectual, is deported to a death camp, and Anna must flee to Belgium where she joins the Resistance. Meanwhile, Jan escapes with the battered remnants of the Polish army to Britain. When British intelligence asks him to return to Poland in an undercover mission to contact the Resistance, he seizes the opportunity to search for his missing wife.

Through the long night of Nazi occupation, Anna, Jan, and ordinary people across Europe fight a covert war of sabotage and resistance against the overwhelming might of the German war machine. The struggle seems hopeless, but they are determined to take back what is theirs.

I had a chance to review this book back in 2009. It inspires with the stories of average Americans who made a difference when the country was in crisis.

World War II Heroes of Southern Delaware is a book unlike any other ever written. In its pages are profiles of 50 ordinary Americans who did extraordinary things during a time unlike any other in American history. These are men and women who today call southern Delaware home. In the 1940s, these brave Americans put their lives on hold to fight for freedom and democracy against the horrific threat imposed on the world by Emperor Hirohito of Japan and German Fuhrer Adolph Hitler. When Imperial Japan attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, the world changed forever. These men and women were a big part of that change; they fought to protect our freedom and our way of life.

This is one of my favorite books from 2011. Madeleine Toche races to the front only to find her brother mortally wounded during the German Blitzkrieg attack on France at the outset of World War II. His death and her rape at the hands of an SS Stormtrooper cast Madeleine down a path of death and violence as her desire for revenge reaches a crescendo.

I have other books from this author on my Kindle, but simply haven't had time to read them.

The three books in the Executive Series are phenomenal. They will definitely become favorites of my husband's if he reads them. Gary Grossman is a print and television journalist, an Emmy Award-winning network television producer, and a film and TV historian. He takes that knowledge and weaves suspenseful, action-packed thrillers.

In Book 1, an assassin takes aim at a Presidential candidate during a primary stump speech. The instant he pulls the trigger, the outcome of the election is irrevocably changed. But Democrat Teddy Lodge, an upcoming media sweetheart, isn't killed. His wife is. As a result, Lodge emerges as the man to beat and the greatest threat to the incumbent President, Morgan Taylor. Under a specific directive from the President, Special Service Agent Scott Roarke devles into the case and begins to unravel a deadly plot that incubated for more than 30 years; designed to alter America's allegiances in the Middle East.

In Book 2, The mugging and murder of a female White House staffer leads Secret Service agent Scott Roarke to the elusive and mysterious assassin who manages to always stay one step ahead of him. But as the plot unfolds, new clues about the assassin's past come to light, and they just may give him the tools he needs to catch his quarry.

In Book 3, the clock is ticking down to an attack on America's most vulnerable
natural resource: Water. Our nation's water resources are high on terrorist target

lists, but low on America's consciousness. Water sources are largely unprotected, providing open access to any enemy with chemicals and biotoxins.

So far we've been lucky. But that luck won't last.

This is the all-too-real-and-present danger facing President Morgan Taylor and Secret Service Agent Scott Roarke as they desperately try to prevent hell-bent terrorists from destroying America and its infrastructure city by city, and state by state.

I picked up a copy of Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford this weekend at the writers conference I attended. Swofford was a panelist. Jarhead was turned into a movie in 2005 starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx, and Lucas Black. Although I didn't know the author before he appeared at the conference, I figured this book would be right up my husband's alley.

When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.

Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.

I picked up a copy of Early Warning by Michael Walsh at a library paperback book sale.

The NSA's most lethal weapon is back. Code-named Devlin, he operates in the darkest recesses of the US government. When international cyber-terrorists allow a deadly and cunning band of radical insurgents to breach the highest levels of national security, Devlin must take down an enemy bent on destroying America - an enemy more violent and ruthless than the world has ever known.

This book appears to be the sequel to Walsh's Hostile Intent. Another book in this series, Shock Warning, has also been released.