The following titles are available in sets of approximately fifteen copies; sometimes more. Those with an asterisk * have a study guide to accompany the title. Please call (801) 359-9670 to check availability. We invite you to select books from the following themes. (Some titles may be found in more than one category.)

Lives in War-Time

American Pastoral - (Philip Roth, 1997) Symbolic of turbulent times of the 1960s, the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard sweeps away the innocence of Swede Levov, along with everything industriously created by his family over three generations in America.

* Burning the Days: Recollection – (James Salter, 1997) James Salter commemorates his life with a precision of thought and language that is at once clarifying and intoxicating. His descriptions of attending a military academy, flying in the Korean War, learning about the naivete of a mistress, making movies, or relishing the smile of a girl in a skimpy dress in a Roman café – they are all made by an incomparable observer and storyteller. Weaving the recollections of time, desire, pleasure, and regret, Salter creates an unforgettable memoir.

Cold Mountain - (Charles Frazier, 1997) An adventure story and love story are intertwined in this powerful and majestically moving book about a man who had been fighting at Petersburg and decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the woman he loves fights to revive her fathers farm and survive. He encounters slaves, marauders, bounty hunters and witches either try to help or hurt him. An Authentic American Odyssey.

Davita’s Harp- (Chaim Potok, 1985) For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence.

* A Farewell to Arms - (Ernest Hemingway, 1957) “A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms.” A story about World War I and the experiences of an ambulance driver on the Italian front and “his passion for a beautiful nurse.” Intense, glowing, and descriptive fit this wonderful work.

* Home Before Morning: The Story of an Army Nurse in Vietnam - (Lynda Van Devanter, 2001) A suspenseful autobiography that gives a painfully honest look at war through a woman’s eyes. Feel the fatigue, rain, mud, heat and personal danger that Van Devanter felt as she is assigned to an evacuation hospital near the Cambodian border.

How to Cook a Wolf — (MFK Fisher, 1942) If you love to read and love to cook (or have to cook), you will relish How to Cook a Wolf, by MFK Fisher.  Written in 1942 to inspire courage in those daunted by wartime shortages, the book has become a classic.   It is a memoir, a cookbook, and a commentary on the war, sprinkled liberally with delicious quotations about food from Emerson, Thackeray, Tolstoy and others.   Fisher wrote over a dozen books, most of them focused on the art of cooking and eating.  During the bleak years of World War II, rather than counsel hungry people on cutting back and making do, she gave her readers license to dream, to construct adventurous meals, even with simple ingredients, that would feed the spirit as much as the body. 

The Milagro Beanfield War: Volume One of the Mexican Trilogy – (John Nichols, 1866) Joe’s gardens shriveled in drought because over thirty-five years before some complicated and political maneuvering had relocated the water from the Milagro’s Indian Creek to some big-time farmers in other parts of the state. One day he decides to irrigate the little field in front of his old house to grow some beans, catalyzing tensions which had been building for years.

* Night – (Elie Wiesel, 1960) A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God.  Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

A Rumor of War – (Philip Caputo, 1977) The Seattle Times called this book “the most eloquent statement yet on what Vietnam was for the lower echelons who had to do the dirty work.” Based on personal experience, the novel is, in the author’s words, “simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them.”

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