Events
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Start: 7:30 pm
Historic LoDo: Historian Gerald Meehl will discuss and sign his new book One Marine’s War: A Combat Interpreter’s Quest for Humanity in the Pacific (Naval Institute Press). An unusual account of a young American in combat in the Pacific during World War II, this book describes the experiences of Marine language officer Robert Sheeks, who was decorated for saving enemy lives, not taking them. Meehl recounts how Sheeks overcame his initial bitter hatred of the Japanese, formed after seeing firsthand the brutal actions perpetrated by the Japanese military against Chinese civilians in Shanghai years before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Meehl traces Sheeks’ extraordinary humanitarian quest to prevent the needless deaths of Japanese soldiers and civilians while serving as a combat interpreter during the intense fighting on the islands of Saipan and Tinian. Sheeks, the subject of this book, will join us for this event.
Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com
Start: 7:30 pm
Colfax Avenue: Megan Kate Nelson, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University, will discuss and sign her new book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Univ. of Georgia Press), examining the narratives and images of that war's destructiveness—cities, houses, forests, and soldiers’ bodies transformed into “dead heaps of ruins” in the southern landscape. This ruination dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the
“savage” behavior of men. And the obliteration was a shared
experience—one of the ironies of the war. Northern and southern, black and white, male and female, all found common ground in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness, as they considered the war's costs. Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together striking images with environmental and cultural histories, to show the evocative power of such acts, now all but erased from our national consciousness. Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com
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