The art spy : the extraordinary untold tale of WWII resistance hero Rose Valland / Young, Michelle (Michelle T.)
Extraordinary untold tale of WWII resistance hero Rose Valland
"On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans' final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth -- a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity's cultural inheritance? Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi's art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history's largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him. At every stage of World War II, Valland was front and center. She came face to face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, passed crucial information to the Resistance network, put herself deliberately in harm's way to protect the museum and her staff, and faced death during the last hours of Liberation Day. At the same time, a young Free French soldier, Alexandre Rosenberg, was fighting his way to Paris with the Allied forces battling to liberate France. Alexandre's father was the exclusive art dealer for Picasso, Matisse, George Braque, and Fernand Léger. The Nazis had taken everything from their family -- their art collection, their nationality, their gallery, and their home in Paris. Vivid and atmospheric, The Art Spy moves from the glittering days of pre-War Paris, home to geniuses of modern culture, including Picasso, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Le Corbusier, and Frida Kahlo, through the tension-riddled cities and resorts of Europe on the eve of war, to the harrowing years of the Nazi occupation of France when brave people such as Valland and Rosenberg risked everything to fight monstrous evil"--

Class clown : the memoirs of a professional wiseass : how I went 77 years without growing up / Barry, Dave

A humorous memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Dave Barry, reflecting on his long career of comedic commentary and life experiences without losing his sense of humour.

Detained : a boy's journal of survival and resilience / Esperanza, D.

"D. Esperanza was just thirteen years old when he lost his caregivers, his beloved grandmother and uncle. Since both of his parents were working and living in the United States, D. was left on his own in a small town in Honduras. He quickly realized he simply could not make enough money to survive so he made the difficult decision to head north with his cousins and hopefully reunite with his parents in el norte. Together, the boys struggled to survive a long and treacherous journey through Central America and Mexico. Along the way, D. and his cousins formed a deep bond, only for the four to be brutally separated at the border of the United States. When he is captured and processed at a facility, neither D. nor his family are given an update on when he will be released or where he'll go next. Over the next five months, he kept a journal of his experience. The pages tell a story of pain, cruelty, friendship, and resilience, a living testament to the reality of the border. Amidst the senseless inhumanity and violence of US immigration policy, D. found hope in the friendship he and his fellow companions forged, and mentorship from one intrepid advocate who fought on his behalf named Gerardo Iván Morales"--

Encampment : resistance, grace, and an unhoused community / Helwig, Maggie

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto's Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. Encampment tells the story of Helwig's life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society's callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.

The front runner : the life of Steve Prefontaine / O'Meara, Brendan

"In the fifty years since his tragic death in a car crash, Steve Prefontaine has towered over American distance running. One of the most recognizable and charismatic figures to ever run competitively in the United States, Prefontaine has endured as a source of inspiration and fascination -- a talent who presaged the American running boom of the late 1970s and helped put Nike on the map as the brand's first celebrity-athlete face. Now on the anniversary of his untimely death, author Brendan O'Meara, host of the Creative Nonfiction podcast, offers a fresh, definitive retelling of Prefontaine's life, revisiting one of the most enigmatic figures in American sports with a twenty-first-century lens. Through dozens of original interviews with family, friends, teammates, and competitors, this long-overdue reappraisal of Prefontaine -- the first such exhaustive treatment in almost thirty years -- provides never-before-told stories about the unique talent, innovative mental strength, and personal struggles that shaped Prefontaine on and off the track. Bringing new depth to an athlete long eclipsed by his brash, aggressive running style and the heartbreak of his death at twenty-four, O'Meara finds the man inside the myth, scrutinizing a legacy that has shaped American sports culture for decades. What emerges is a singular portrait of a distinctly American talent, a story written in the pines and firs of the Pacific Northwest back when running was more blue-collar love than corporate pursuit -- the story of a runner whose short life casts a long, fast shadow"--

I will come back for you : a family torn apart by war and a son's search to save them / Stanyon, Rachel.

A gripping account of hidden identity, military courage, and an against-all-odds reunion. Four days after Germany's surrender in May 1945, a young British officer took a jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, Gans had fled to England. As soon as he could, he signed up to fight, serving in the legendary British 'Three Troop', an elite unit made up of German-speaking refugees, and joining in the D-Day Normandy landings. Working undercover, he obtained vital intelligence, helped liberate occupied France and the Netherlands, and saved countless lives on both sides of the front. All the while, he dreamed of being reunited with his family, still trapped behind enemy lines, and with his childhood sweetheart, Anita. As the war ended, chaos reigned in Germany: defeated Wehrmacht soldiers faced columns of American and British soldiers, concentration camp survivors crossed paths with SS guards, and Soviet military roadblocks controlled the route to the east. Manfred overcame all of these, finally reaching the place where his parents had last been seen: Theresienstadt.

Mark Twain / Chernow, Ron

"Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, under Halley's Comet, the rambunctious Twain was an early teller of tall tales. He left his home in Missouri at an early age, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and arrived in the Nevada Territory during the silver-mining boom. Before long, he had accepted a job at the local newspaper, where he barged into vigorous discourse and debate, hoaxes and hijinks. After moving to San Francisco, he published stories that attracted national attention for their brashness and humor, writing under a pen name soon to be immortalized. Chernow draws a richly nuanced portrait of the man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune and crafted his celebrity persona with meticulous care. Twain eventually settled with his wife and three daughters in Hartford, where he wrote some of his most well-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, earning him further acclaim. He threw himself into American politics, emerging as the nation's most notable pundit. While his talents as a writer and speaker flourished, his madcap business ventures eventually forced him into bankruptcy; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play. Drawing on Twain's bountiful archives, including his fifty notebooks, thousands of letters, and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures a man whose career reflected the country's westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars. No other white author of his generation grappled so fully with the legacy of slavery after the Civil War or showed such keen interest in African American culture. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain's writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted"--

Queen of all mayhem : the blood-soaked life and mysterious death of Belle Starr, the most dangerous woman in the West / Huckelbridge, Dane.

"A riveting, deeply researched, blood-on-the-spurs biography of Belle Starr, the most legendary female outlaw of the American West"--

Wild thing : a life of Paul Gauguin / Prideaux, Sue.

"Paul Gauguin's legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved. Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso. Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin's most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin's son, and a sample of Gauguin's teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is "a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin ... not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach" (Artemis Cooper, Spectator)"--

Yet here I am : lessons from a Black man's search for home / Capehart, Jonathan

"MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart is one of the most recognizable faces in cable news. But long before that success, Capehart spent his boyhood growing up without his father, shuttling back and forth between New Jersey and rural Severn, North Carolina, contemplating the complexities of race and identity as they shifted around him. It was never easy bridging two worlds; whether being told he was too smart or not smart enough, too black or not black enough, Capehart struggled to find his place. Then, an internship at The Today Show altered the course of his life, bringing him one step closer to his dream. From there, Capehart embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Yet Here I Am takes us along that journey, from his years at Carleton College, where he learns to embrace his identity as a gay, black man surrounded by a likeminded community; to his decision to come out to his family, risking rejection; and finally to his move to New York City, where time and again he stumbles and picks himself up as he blazes a path to become the familiar face in news we know today. Honest and endearing, Yet Here I Am is an inspirational memoir of identity, opportunity, and of finding one's voice and purpose along the way"--