Book Review Books HISTORY Military Non-Fiction Photography

“The 20th PID Book” by Nancy Finston

The work of war is often remembered through battles, commanders, and acts of courage. Far less attention is paid to the painstaking labor that made those events possible. Nancy Finston’s The 20th PID Book: A Rare Look at a WWII Photo Intelligence Detachment fills in those gaps. Part family tribute, part military history, and part restored archival document, the book preserves the story of the men who studied aerial photographs and turned what they saw into usable battlefield intelligence.

Finston’s father, William J. Snoddon, served in the 20th Photo Intelligence Detachment of the Ninth Air Force. Like many veterans, he spoke little about his wartime service. What remained was a metal box of documents and a commemorative book assembled by members of the unit in 1945. Finston reproduces that keepsake here, adding captions, enlargements, definitions, and historical context that allow contemporary readers to understand material originally created by and for specialists.

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Books HISTORY POETRY

“Send Down the Master in Person” by A. Keith Carreiro

Let’s start by admitting there is nothing remotely poetic about Adolf Eichmann.

Not his work as the chief administrator of the holocaust, not his rank as an SS-Obersturmbannführer under Hitler, not the banality of his evil, as Hannah Arendt famously called it.

And yet, here in Send Down the Master in Person: Reflections on Adolf Eichmann is an entire poem about him, a heavily annotated nine-page poem about the apprehension of a notorious war criminal, told in the voice of one of the apprehending agents, an associate of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

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Books HISTORY MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / BIOGRAPHY Non-Fiction TRAVEL & NATURE

“Hiking Through History” by Kirk Ward Robinson

Travel writing is often some of the best non-fiction a person can read, for when it’s rooted in real experience – when it is actually based on something meaningful to the writer — it’s easier for the author to draw the reader into the narrative with the power of authenticity and verisimilitude. The best of these books, for instance, Donald Richie’s’ The Inland Sea, can be as powerful as any great novel. With Hiking Through History Hannibal, Highlanders & Joan of Arc, Kirk Ward Robinson really succeeded in pulling me into his story, especially with his unique way of approaching the past, suggesting that we walk the same paths and explore the same regions as our illustrious ancestors, including Hannibal, Joan of Arc, and William Wallace.

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