To purchase The Green Box direct from Jim Kurtz, click here:

The Green Box book

Since our documentary project started with Jim Kurtz's book, this month we decided to share books we've been reading that are focused on WWII stories. Both Jim Kurtz & Vicki Hughes have chosen 2 non-fiction books to recommend, and I (Holly Stadtler) have chosen 3 fictional books. We hope you like our recommendations & please feel free to share any WWII related books or films you've enjoyed (hollybstadtler@gmail.com).

We are set for our final interview for the film 11/1, and shortly thereafter will have a rough cut to share with PBS. We will keep you apprised of how things are progressing! Now for our recommendations...

THE GREEN BOX Author Jim Kurtz

Read more about My War here:

My War book

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Read more about The Greatest Generation & purchase here:

The Greatest Generation book

Jim Kurtz highly recommends Andy Rooney's My War - a firsthand account of his experience as a newspaper writer for Stars and Stripes while traveling with soldiers in France after the Normandy invasion. He risked his life continually while embedded with American soldiers and even flew on a couple of B-17 missions. Although known for his humor (the commentator at the end of 60 Minutes for decades), this account is much more serious.

Jim also lists Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation as a must read for WWII history buffs. A quote from Andy Rooney appears on the back cover of Brokaw's book and is one of Jim's all-time favorites. Rooney always resisted being labeled a member of the Greatest Generation, especially by Brokaw. In the mid-80's, some 40 years after the Normandy Invasion, Rooney closed a 60 Minutes CBS show answering Brokaw with these poignant words: "They were all my age. I think of the good life I have lived, and they never had a chance to live. They didn't give their lives. Their lives were taken."

I’ve read several fictional books based on WWII stories recently that have been superb. My favorite is All the Light We Can Not See by Anthony Doerr. This book intricately weaves the stories of a blind girl in occupied Paris with a bright young German boy written in poetic style switching between the two in alternating chapters.The novel won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

I’ve also enjoyed Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale  which chronicles the life of two sisters during the war in France - “sisters separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France” (author’s description). A  #1 New York Times bestseller & Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year, it will be adapted into a movie.

Another in my top 3 is From Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. This book gives the perspective of 4 refugees fleeing Germany as the war was ending and reveals back stories of sorrow & loss as we root for their lives to be spared.

Executive Producer/Co-Director Holly Stadtler

Book Links:  

All the Light...

The Nightingale

From Salt to Sea

Vicki Hughes, Co-Director/Writer

Book links:

Great Escape book

Wooden Horse book



Wikipedia page for Great Escape

Two books, which capture the reality of day-to day-life in a WWII POW camp were written by veterans of the era, and both were written about Stalag Luft III, the camp where Bob Kurtz spent most of his time as a prisoner. 

The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams, a captured English RAF officer, recounts his escape with two other POWS from the infamous camp. This escape occurred in 1943 and the book describes not only the life of prisoners, but the desperate life of escapees. 

The Great Escape, by Paul Brickhill, is the account of the most famous escape of all, and is the book on which the film was based. Brickhill didn’t escape with the 80 soldiers who got out, but he was involved in the attempt. Like Bob Kurtz, he made the desperate winter march… who knows, they may have known one another.