100 Books Like Dark Harbor

This history traces some of the ties between Irish revolutionaries and Jewish ones in Palestine and provides an unvarnished history of the events and personalities leading to the establishment of the Jewish state.

For Paul O’Dwyer, his own activism as an “Irish Zionist” in New York after WWII was motivated by his antagonism towards the British, viewing the British Mandate in what was then Palestine as the chief obstacle to a lasting arrangement beneficial to Jews and Arabs. He supported Jewish militant groups seeking to evict the British and open Palestine’s ports much wider to Holocaust survivors in Europe.

“The Little Flower” matched his effectiveness in battling Tammany Hall on the stump with his success as the corruption-fighting Fusion mayor of New York. Kessner discusses how this much-loved figure (even the subject of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize-winning musical) initially frustrated O’Dwyer’s brother Bill (his Democratic successor in 1946) by winning for a third time in a row in 1941.

Kessner shows how he was integral to the making of modern New York. In death, New York’s most outstanding leader took on new luster among good-government advocates and many others when Bill’s time in Gracie Mansion was short-circuited by the Bronx Democratic boss amid a pervasive police department scandal.

One of O’Dwyer’s early prominent battles for the First Amendment and civil rights occurred when he represented families evicted for opposing a racial color line in the selection of tenants of MetLife’s Stuyvesant Town in lower Manhattan, built with assistance from the La Guardia administration.

Through Bagli’s carefully researched history of this watershed battle over the authority of a private landlord to bar African Americans, he explains that O’Dwyer’s involvement in the case on behalf of progressive tenants helped pave the way for Metlife to build the smaller Riverton housing development in Harlem as a concession to critics. Over time, city and state laws would make housing discrimination illegal.

A richly detailed and often riveting narrative on the 1960s, particularly the divisive and tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the enormous antiwar movement (both events in which O’Dwyer played a leading role as a Senate candidate and anti-Vietnam War ally of Eugene McCarthy).

Accounts of urban riots drawn in part from court records bring the decade’s harsh and even brutal edge to life.

Machine Dreams is a wrenching novel that chronicles an American family through decades of reflection and turbulence, culminating in the shattering ramifications of the Vietnam War. For those of us who learned to refract the U.S. through the prism of that savagery, which left millions of Vietnamese dead and vast stretches of their country burned and poisoned, Machine Dreams was a novel that radiated the heartsickness of that era on the home front. American families were, indeed, torn apart by that war, but the weaknesses of those bonds had abiding roots. I was weeping by the time I finished this novel but hasten to add that I have no regrets about the experience, only gratitude. 

All My Sins Remembered is a deeply felt, moving story of what happens to Otto McGavin, a well-meaning Anglo-Buddhist who joins the intergalactic Confederacion at age 22 to travel off Earth and help protect the rights of humans and nonhumans, is trained to become an agent of the Confederacion, and loses his soul in the process.

First published in 1977, this is a searing near-future tale that should be required reading for anyone considering a career in the Secret Service.

Grandmaster science fiction writer Joe Haldeman is renowned in the field for his decades of brilliant stories and books. Awarded the Hugo and Nebula, he is the author of the Forever War trilogy, The Hemingway Hoax, 1968, and many others.

His work often features scathing treatments of warfare and the brutal idiocy of military bureaucracy, based on his firsthand experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War.

Elaine Shepard wrote Doom Pussy in 1967 and explained in her introduction that only the pilots who flew on missions at night to North Vietnam were entitled to wear the Doom Pussy patch on their left shoulders. On the patch was a cat with an eye patch eating an airplane, and in Vietnamese were the words “Trong miệng của con mèo của định mạng” and literally translated means, “I have flown into the jaws of the cat of death.” Most American fliers just said, “I have seen the Doom Pussy.” This was another one of those amazing stories about a woman that competes with distinction in what was then considered a man’s world, journalism. She flew into combat on a Huey slick with Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Honour. Col. Honour was killed three months after Ms. Shepard flew with him. She has chronicled her exploits and those of the pilots she… show more.

The author subtitles this book, which I read in the hardback, The 1972 Easter Offensive America’s Last Vietnam Battle. To me, I did not consider this to be the last American battle in Vietnam as this battle was conducted by the South Vietnamese forces with assistance only from US Advisors, helicopters, and Air Force aircraft.

I found the book to be an excellent account of the actions of US advisors and helicopter crews and certainly informative on the future use of our military in an advisory role. I was amazed at the courage displayed by all, but especially by US Marine advisors and US Army advisors with Airborne and Ranger units.

I had an opportunity to discuss the book with one of the Marine advisors, and he verified the accuracy of the events in the book that he had experienced. 

Women participated in the Vietnam War, and Duong Thu Huong was among them. In 1965, she joined the Communist Youth Brigade in Hanoi and found herself within months serving in it on the frontlines in South Vietnam.

Like Bao Ninh, she experienced the horrors of the Vietnam War close-up. In her Novel Without a Name, however, Duong Thu Huong tells her story through the eyes of a young male soldier, Quan. We don’t go into battle with him; rather, we follow him behind the lines, on visits home, in meetings with friends and former lovers, and even into his dreams, where he begins to question the war he is fighting.

It’s a journey into disillusionment, convincingly told by someone who knew what she was talking about. 

As a child, I lived in abject poverty on a little farm in northern Minnesota. By ten years old I was trapping raccoons and shooting squirrels to help put food on our table. When I was in Vietnam, I felt a deep empathy for the Vietnamese fishermen and farmers who lived in poverty complicated by the vicious war. Years later when I began reading Dang Thuy Tram’s diary, I couldn’t put it down. The loss and waste and love for her comrades struck close to home and made me feel guilty for my participation in the war. In her writing, Dang brings to life so many of her Vietnamese comrades who were killed—making one stop to consider the cost of war. In a way the book reminds me of All Quiet on the Western Front written by a German soldier—the loss and waste.