KDL Recommends

Cass Wakefield, a Civil War veteran, agrees to accompany a neighbor, 54-year-old terminally ill widow Alison Sansing, to Tennessee to recover the bodies of her father and brother, killed at Franklin. As they travel north, Cass’s memories return with painful vividness, culminating as he walks over the scene of his army’s disastrous defeat.

Brooks’ luminous second novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. This affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.

In lyrical and evocative prose, Burke depicts both the boredom and horror of army life and the injustices visited upon blacks and poor whites by the “haves” in Southern society.

This well-executed alternative history imagines a Confederate victory at Gettysburg. Readers may come away from this exciting novel believing events really did happen this way.

The story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood.

A classic work of American literature, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. 

On D-Day, when Easy Company’s commanding officer is killed, Winters takes charge minutes after landing deep in German territory and leads an assault against a German battery. Winters has been praised as an exemplar of leadership, and here he shows what he did to earn that praise and how he did it.

Historian Stephen Ambrose tells the horrifying, hallucinatory saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members he calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45.

Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life.

A firsthand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation and the only Marine in World War II to have received the Medal of Honor, the Navy Cross, and a Purple Heart.

This riveting memoir follows Leckie’s odyssey, from basic training on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place.

The captivating story of the 234-man company ordered to secure a rocky promontory overlooking the legendary Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War.

A Pulitzer Prize winning book, McPherson’s fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox.

This award-winning film tells the story of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, an all-black unit comprising Northern freemen and escaped slaves. Meticulously depicting the terrible conditions under which these neglected soldiers fought and illuminating the tenacity of the human spirit.

Gregory Peck heads a star-studded cast charged with a near impossible mission: destroy a pair of German guns nestled in a protective cave on the strategic Mediterranean island of Navarone.

A vivid recreation of D-Day featuring a stellar international cast. A fascinating look at the massive preparations, mistakes, and random events that determined the outcome of one of the biggest battles in history.

In 1776 South Carolina, widower and legendary war hero Benjamin Martin finds himself thrust into the midst of the American Revolutionary War as he helplessly watches his family torn apart by the savage forces of the British Redcoats.

Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic tells the emotional story of an Army captain who, after facing the horrors of Omaha Beach on D-Day, receives orders to lead his troops on a search for a lost paratrooper whose three brothers were killed in combat.