"'Women can be heroes, too.' When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances Frankie McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins...

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an American Black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a Black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly...

"In 1942, Hazel Francis leaves Wichita, Kansas, for California to do her part for the war effort. At Douglas Aircraft, she becomes one of many "Rosie the Riveters," helping construct bombers for the U.S. military. She excels at the job and takes a pride in her work that she's never felt before. But when the war is over, men return to their factory jobs, and women like Hazel are dismissed, expected to return home to become wives and mothers. With no...

"Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. In the panoramic tradition of Charles Frazier's fiction, Phantoms is a fierce saga of American culpability. A Vietnam vet still reeling from war, John Frazier finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor,...