Mary Louise Roberts: 3 books

“Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges.” Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one woman in Normandy in June of 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was under way. Though they yearned for liberation,...

In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional...

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle...