NON-FICTION

President Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the slogan “The Arsenal of Democracy” to describe American might during the grim years of World War II. The man who financed that arsenal was his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. This is the first book to focus on the wartime achievements of this unlikely hero—a dyslexic college dropout who turned himself into a forceful and efficient administrator and then exceeded even Roosevelt in his determination to defeat the Nazis.

This hard-hitting but fair assessment of Nova Scotia and the Maritimes will shock and surprise many Maritimers who have been conditioned to think that the east coast of Canada is one of the most liveable regions in the country. Author Peter Moreira, a native Maritimer who returned home after working overseas for more than a decade, offers a straightforward analysis of why the region has fallen so far behind the rest of the country in terms of most economic and social indicators.

Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn had no idea of what they would discover when they set out for Hong Kong, China, and Burma in 1941. The husband-and-wife team of celebrity literati intended to report on the China-Japan war while honeymooning in the romantic Far East. What they found was a maddening, intriguing, colorful world of dictators and drunks, scoundrels and socialites, heroes and halfwits. And their trip proved to be the beginning of the end of their marriage.