Robert Underhill

You and your four friends meet every morning for breakfast. One morning, one of your group - a guy with extremely set habits and routines - fails to show up. The Sheriff's Department is comfortable with a simple explanation that completely contradicts what you know of your friend. Maddening What would you do? Of Course You'd form your own detective team and launch a real investigation.

Normandy is indelible in accounts of WWII, and scribes often overlook the invasion of Southern France. Prior to WWII, the northern shores of the Mediterranean were where titled barons of Europe and the rich or famous from America often sought refuge. In the southern campaign, the numbers were smaller but sacrifices equally costly. Wounds were as painful, blood flowed just as red, and corpses remained as dead as those up north.The Southern Invasion, given the code name Dragoon, was controversial. Churchill was reluctant; American General Mark Clark stalled at Anzio in Italy also opposed it. Yet General George Marshall, the major strategist, won endorsement from Supreme Commander of the Allies, General Dwight Eisenhower. Within three months, Allied troops in the south linked up with Third Army elements coming down from the north. The linkage marked the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. Allies captured the German border city of Strasbourgh, and six months afterwards, the maniacal der Fuhrer committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.

When Dr. Tom Leckrone, a parachutist and combat medic at Normandy and Arnheim, first receives the news that his wife back home in America has borne a child, he is shocked. But not because he has suddenly become a father. No, Leckrone is truly surprised by the presence of this baby because he has been overseas for more than a year, and he hasn't seen Velma once in that time.He returns home determined not to raise another man's offspring, but by the time he arrives, Velma is dead. All that remains is baby LuAnne and Kathie, Velma's longtime friend who must now take care of her.Despite his initial reluctance to have anything to do with the product of his wife's infidelity, Tom can't help but slowly grow attached...to both LuAnne and the charming Kathy.

"Victory," President John F. Kennedy once declared, "has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan."The aphorism is appropriate because who it was that first came up with the plan for shuttle bombing by U. S. Air Forces based in Italy or England with landings and servicing in Soviet Russia is uncertain. The idea was grandiose in scope but failed to accomplish its purposes.What is known is that twenty-one months after America officially declared war, General Barney Giles from the U. S. Air Staff for Plan and Combat Operations wrote the following memo to General Laurence Kuter: Request that you prepare plans for discussions, findings, and recommendations on the employment of our heavy bomber force from Russian airports. Your plans should initially include only shuttle service, that is, take-off from England in possibly very bad weather, bomb military objectives in Germany and land under favorable weather conditions on airports in Russia; re-service and bomb German targets en route back to England or possibly en route to Italy...

Ezra Evans is sixteen years old and, like most girls in 1936, she dreams of marrying her high school crush, Brad Abbott, living happily in his home as his wife, and eventually becoming a mother.But when her father, one of the most affluent men in the country, is murdered a few years later by a disgruntled sharecropper, everything changes. Suddenly, she and her mother have inherited his sprawling estate, and her plans for the perfect life fall apart.With her relationship in tatters, Edra has no choice but to move back to her small-town home and try to untangle her father's imperfect records. It's not long before she finds success, but it comes at a cost. Her love life has never been perfect, but after a series of failed relationships with men more likely to lie than love her, she's all but given up on the idea of happily ever after.That's when Brad re-enters her life, and Edra decides it's time to play a game of her own making.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are two men whose backgrounds were very dissimilar but whose achievements proved to be roughly comparable—both became President of the United States. It is, for example, ironic that the wealthy Roosevelt is best known for his social programs and that Truman, who came from modest circumstances in the Middle West, achieved his greatest success in foreign affairs. This study demonstrates, with some flair, the variety and the breadth of the American experience and provides, in part, a credible basis for the existence of an American Dream.