Book Reviews

Title: The Ensign Locker
Author: John Zerr
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Sandra Miller Linhart

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1450243843

Set in 1966. Most of the action takes place aboard USS Manfred, a Navy destroyer, operating in the waters off North and South Vietnam. The five junior officers live in the ensign locker. Against a backdrop of the social, moral, and geographic forces working to shape the nation, and the expanding Navy's efforts to adjust to the demands of this new war, the denizens of the ensign locker all struggle to adapt to the Navy and to the rigors of combat, but no one struggles more than the junior ensign, Jon Zachery. But even after a new commanding officer takes a personal dislike to Zachery, nothing affects the junior ensign as much as being personally attacked by anti-war college students after he returns from his combat deployment.

Title: Dragonslayers: Mind Games
Author: Kathy Rowe
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Sandra Miller Linhart

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1453689206

Mind Games, the stand-alone second installment of Project: Dragonslayers follows the Special Forces Team into Al-Qaeda territory, where they uncover the secrets of the terrorists' latest weapons of mass destruction.

Title: Dosha, flight of the Russian Gypsies
Author: Sonia Meyer
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Lee Boyland

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0982711514

In 1956 Khrushchev s Thaw triggers the Hungarian Revolution and upheaval in the Soviet Empire. During Khrushchev s first state visit to Helsinki, Dosha, star rider of the Soviet Dressage Team and her horse defect with the help of local Gypsies. The novel follows the life of Dosha, a Gypsy in disguise. It offers unique insight into the tribal life of nomadic Gypsies, who under Stalin joined partisans fighting Nazi invaders, only to face entrapment during Khrushchev s Thaw. By then Dosha and her talented circus horse have been drafted into the dressage team in Leningrad. Navigating political intrigue, narrowly escaping discovery by the KGB, she enters a love forbidden to Gypsy women. One goal remains uppermost in her mind leading her tribe and her horse to freedom in the West.

Title: Domers
Author: David Couzins
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: jim greenwald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0983086303

2080 A.D., the United States is a “virtual” country where citizens live sealed inside millions of family-sized domes protected from the terrors of the Outside. A betrothed couple is kidnapped from their home and for the first time is exposed to Nature and to Freedom while getting caught up in a multi-tribe Native American army’s war with Mexico.

Title: Distant War: Recollections of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
Author: Marc Yablonka
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 098341680X

This is a newly-edited compilation of eighteen years of Yablonka's reportage on American involvement in Indochina and the people affected by America's connection to that part of the world. After all those years and numerous articles about an indelible mark on American history published in the likes of the U.S. Military's Stars and Stripes, Army Times, American Veteran, the Weider History Group publication Vietnam Magazine and others, these stories needed a wider audience for the world to know what they suffered, how most survived, and how they overcame adversity.

Distant War: Recollections of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, will be the vehicle to the reader's understanding of a war and its aftermath that may seem distant now, but what is important is that it will make readers realize--if they haven't already--that in war, whether in the jungles of Vietnam or the sands of Iraq, in a very real sense, while who wins and who loses is obviously important, what is equally necessary is that good somehow must and shall prevail.