americans

Just after Cassie Arroyo found the Spear of Destiny in Rome, it was stolen from her, so now she and her friend Asher must recover it--but when she used the Spear before, she set the world down a dangerous path, and if she recovers it she will have to decide whether to risk using it again.

"The US military is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, and newly-minted lieutenant Jack Porter struggles to accept how it's happening--through alliances with warlords who have Arab and American blood on their hands. Day after day, Jack tries to assert his leadership in the sweltering, dreary atmosphere of Ashuriyah. But his world is disrupted by the arrival of veteran Sergeant Daniel Chambers, whose aggressive style threatens to undermine the fragile peace that the troops have worked hard to establish"--Dust jacket flap.

Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is called upon to solve the murder of the wife of an esteemed archaeologist, killed while accompanying her husband on a dig deep in the Iraqi desert.

Oh! is a hybrid novel, with nonfiction and artwork mixed in. A jaded American, deadened by consumer culture, becomes dangerously obsessed with a group suicide in Japan. The main storyline follows Zack Hara, a young Japanese American searching for an emotional life while traveling in Japan. Zack finds an ally in a professor and underground poet who introduces him to the concept of mono no aware, roughly translated as the emotive essence of things, or the sadness in beauty. The professor, grieving for a missing daughter, assigns Zack a set of mysterious tasks. Zack?s search for self-discovery turns into a search for the professor?s missing daughter, and draws him into the tragic phenomenon of suicide clubs. Structured as a thriller with a most unexpected finale, Shimoda?s novel unravels like a Japanese scroll?one cannot put it down until the last scene comes into full view and, with it, the realization that the realm of feelings ( mono no aware ) is far from being an innocent enterprise; it carries risks that one must be ready to pay in order to fully understand. This is a brilliant novel?it makes the reader feel the pleasure of thinking. ??Michael F. Marra, professor of Japanese literature, UCLA.

Tells the story of two star-crossed lovers, graduate students Julian Rose and Claire Marvel, spanning fourteen years of attempts at happiness while spouses, children, and misunderstandings block the way.

Seventeen-year-old Tony, a soccer player whose parents are divorcing, goes to Atami, Japan, to spend four-and-a-half months with a Japanese family.

"This little-known WWII story introduces a renegade pilot whose personal mission to rescue his family from a POW camp changed modern air warfare forever. December 1941: Manila is invaded, and US citizen and Philippine Airlines manager, Pappy Gunn, is ordered to fly key military command out of the country, leaving his family at home. So Gunn was miles away when the Japanese captured his wife and children, placing them in an internment camp where they faced disease, abuse, and starvation. Gunn spent three years trying to rescue them. His exploits became legend as he revolutionized the art of air warfare, devising his own weaponry, missions, and combat strategies. By the end of the war, Pappy's ingenuity and flair for innovation helped transform MacArthur's air force into the scourge of the Pacific"--.

There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. Black didn't even know its proper name. But he knew about the Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans had ventured. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth. Everything about the Valley was myth and rumor. The strung-out platoon Black finds after traveling deep into the heart of the Valley, and the illumination of the dark secrets accumulated during month after month fighting and dying in defense of an indefensible piece of land, provide a shattering portrait of men at war. Written by a former army officer who served in Iraq.

While visiting Paris in 1927, Aimee, a wealthy American, falls in love with Heinrich, a charming, yet penniless Baltic aristocrat. They marry, but life in 1930s Germany is bleak. Two years into World War II, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front. Left to fend for herself in a country at war with her homeland, Aimee gathers up her children and flees the advancing Russian army on an epic journey to the country she thought she left behind. Her daughter, Sigrid, tells the story of her mother's life, as well as her own.