McBride, James. Miracle at St. Anna (Riverland Trade, 2003).
Following the huge critical and commercial success of his nonfiction memoir, The Color of Water, McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust. Toward the end of 1944, four black U.S. Army soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in the village as winter and the German army close in. Pvt. Sam Train, a huge, dim-witted, gentle soldier, cares for the traumatized orphan boy and carries a prized statue's head in a sack on his belt. Train and his three comrades are scared and uncertain what to do next, but an Italian partisan named Peppi involves the Americans in a ruthless ploy to uncover a traitor among the villagers. Someone has betrayed the villagers and local partisans to the Germans, resulting in an unspeakable reprisal. Revenge drives Peppi, but survival drives the Americans. The boy, meanwhile, knows the truth of the atrocity and the identity of the traitor, but he clings to Train for comfort and protection. Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.
Miracle at St. Anna (2008), Director: Spike Lee, Running time: 160 minutes.
In the fall of 1944, four African-American soldiers find themselves caught behind enemy lines and surrounded by German soldiers. They take refuge in a small Italian village that has been temporarily vacated by the Germans. In their company in a small boy, obviously shell-shocked and feverish, who seems only to speak to his invisible friend Arturo. Tensions rise among the four men not only because of their life-threatening situation but also because two of them become rivals for the attention of an attractive young woman. When they manage to make contact with their unit, they are told to capture a German soldier for questioning and with the aid of the Italian partisans, have a candidate. What they don't realize is that there is a traitor in the partisan group, one that will have major repercussion on one of the men 40 years later. Written by garykmcd for IMDb.
Olsen, Jack. Silence on Monte Sole (I Books, 2002).
Monte Sole -- Mountain of the Sun -- had the bad luck to lie on the main route of withdrawal of the retreating German armies in the fall of 1944. As the Allied advance stormed up Italy to the very shadow of Monte Sole, Axis frustration over their retreat and the harassing Italian partisans reached its peak.
With full authorization of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and with an infusion of dread SS reinforcements, the Germans determined to neutralize Monte Sole. The result was, in Kesselring's chilling words, "a war operation." In brilliant, page-turning prose, Olsen re-creates the unspeakable three-day butchery of innocent Italian civilians that ranked among the blackest atrocities in the history of man's inhumanity to man.
Jack Olsen served in the U.S. Army Air Force and the OSS. Olsen is the award-winning author of thirty-one books. A former Time bureau chief, Olsen has been described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as an 'American treasure'.
Dennis Brutus has been referred to as one of South Africa's best poets, but most definitely the title of the poet of liberation most defines his life and work. Here he relates his love for his native country, the pain of exile and longing for its liberation.
Sequence for South Africa
1. Golden oaks and jacarandas flowering: exquisite images to wrench my heart.
2. Each day, each hour is not painful, exile is not amputation, there is no bleeding wound no torn flesh and severed nerves; the secret is clamping down holding the lid of awareness tight shut— sealing in the acrid searing stench that scalds the eyes, swallows up the breath and fixes the brain in a wail— until some thoughtless questioner pries the sealed lid loose;
I can exclude awareness of exile until someone calls me one.
3. The agony returns; after a crisis, delirium, surcease and aftermath; my heart knows an exhausted calm, catharsis brings forgetfulness but with recovery, resilience the agony returns.
4. At night to put myself to sleep I play alphabet games but something reminds me of you and I cry out and am wakened.
5. I have been bedded in London and Paris Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in Munich and Frankfort Warsaw and Rome— and still my heart cries out for home!
6. Exile is the reproach of beauty in a foreign landscape, vaguely familiar because it echoes remembered beauty.
