"The story of the remarkable women, including my mother, who served our country and helped shorten World War II. My mom is mentioned in the book"

"To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II movie. To make a comedy about World War II in the middle of World War II is major league balls, and he pulls it off brilliantly. It’s Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. It’s her last film; she’s amazingly funny. And Benny does this great trick of playing the character in the film and yet getting laughs off what you know about the Jack Benny character from out of the movie, without ever disrupting the flow of the story. Just a brilliant movie. Really well worth studying for how to direct a serious comedy about a serious subject, and yet be really funny."

"This heart-wrenching, first-hand account of hiding from the Nazis during World War II shows a young girl’s courage in the face of ultimate death. It is inspiring as well as heartbreaking."

"Now, let’s go to War and Remembrance. As a teenager, I grew up during World War II, and it just had such an impression on me then, and it does now, to reflect back. I think Herman Wouk just captured so much of the spread around the world of the different conflicts that were involved, and quite recently, the unquestionable impact that Winston Churchill had on the outcome of that war."

"This is a recent Booker-winning novel with Tolstoyan ambitions that presents the horrors inflicted on Australian prisoners of war by the Japanese during World War II in Burma - and then turns around and gives us a compassionate portrait of the defeated Japanese. A book distinguished by its big heart and beautiful language."