Shelia Watson

August Wichmann could sway almost anyone. And his means of persuasion were legendary.He attracted supporters with ease. He won the trust of strangers with little effort. He captivated his college students whenever his lessons included him in the personas of different cultures.The SS took notice. So did the Resistance. They both wanted his persuasion skills for their purposes.As a rising SS officer, he convinced himself that he was dedicated in service to his country.Until he witnessed the brutalities firsthand.After that, working with the SS was a daily torment. Doubling for the Resistance created a different kind of agony, as he had to feign indifference to the atrocities to keep his cover secure.Persuading himself to keep up the charade became a grueling ordeal.In his desperate, no-win state, he shared his fears with Brigitte, herself a pawn in the deadly games.Their only reprieve came from those entrenched in the Resistance, including spymaster Admiral Canaris and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became the fixed star by which August and Brigitte navigated their shifting moral boundaries.Set against a tangled web of Abwehr agents and double agents, broken trust and deception, and the earnest hopes and thwarted plans of the Resistance, they tread a precarious path, holding fast to conscience in the face of the horrific evil they were required to fight from the inside.

There's an old saying that the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale starts off with "Once upon a time" and a sea story starts off with "This is no shit."Here in these pages is a heaping pile of "This is no shit" and it starts with the notion that in the Navy, the cardinal rule is: If you can't pay attention, take notes.When does this rule apply? In the Navy, all the time: when training for war includes playing pinochle, when you're mistaken for an NIS agent, when Robert Mitchum (yes, that Robert Mitchum) stops by your barracks for a beer or two, when advancing in the Navy is one damn thing after another.The fun frolic through the sea stories of a Navy "lifer" (seen partly through the eyes of his Navy brat daughter) includes a series of adventures and misadventures when he commandeers an Army jeep in Vietnam, discovers that some side work in New Jersey was mob-related, and commutes to the ship via helicopter.Hear that? They're piping us aboard. Let's weigh anchor and get the sea stories underway

A century before Boston became been the birthplace of the American Revolution, Carolina Colony was the birthplace of entertainment and leisure activities in Colonial America. Building a civilized city in the uncultivated New World was hard work, but Southern settlers made sure to leave time for life’s lighter pursuits. Inspired by the court of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, settlers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Charles Town opened the country’s first public library (Nov. 16, 1700); hosted Henrietta Dering Johnston, the first professional female artist in the colonies (1707-1729); performed the first opera in America at Shepeard’s Tavern (Feb. 18, 1735); founded the first golf club (1786); and many other firsts as the centuries passed. Every aspect of the port city elicited pleasure, from the architecture, to the magnificent parks and manicured gardens. Charleston’s remarkable landscaping was so widely known that in 1785, Louis XVI sent Andre’ Michaux (known as “the king’s botanist”) to America to catalog and collect plants and trees for the royal nurseries in France. Throughout the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression, Charleston and other seaside towns along South Carolina’s coast were fertile ground for art, music, and opportunity. It’s no wonder the region has drawn famous characters for hundreds of years, from political leaders (George Washington; Thomas Heyward, Jr.; John C. Calhoun) to pirates (Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard), and the artists, writers, musicians, and architects who ushered in the Charleston Renaissance in the twentieth century. Take a journey through Charleston’s past with a look at the talented people and inspiring events that shaped the city and surrounding region into a cultural mecca of art, music, dance, and design. Each chapter features an itinerary for a walking/driving tour to help readers appreciate the lesser-known side of Charleston’s entertaining past.