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The Last Thing You Surrender by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

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The Last Thing You Surrender

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Narrator Bill Andrew Quinn

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Length 20 hours 14 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“This is a difficult book to write about. I was so moved by the story - strong feelings of anger, worry, sympathy, pain, trauma and yet there was hope, forgiveness, friendship, family and love. WWII era: Pearl Harbor, Jim Crow south, working class, the privileged, KKK, European war front, Japanese POW camp and the home front. It was a book with so many questions with such a mixture of characters bringing in their own drama to make changes and survive. What you have to keep is your humanity. Great writer, gotta read more.”
— Linda • The Bookloft

Summary

Could you find the courage to do what's right in a world on fire?

Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling author (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s new historical novel is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States.

An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black messman's life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese. A young black woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl Harbor, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war. A black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched, is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion.

Set against a backdrop of violent racial conflict on both the front lines and the home front, The Last Thing You Surrender explores the powerful moral struggles of individuals from a divided nation. What does it take to change someone's mind about race? What does it take for a country and a people to move forward, transformed?

Fiction Historical Fiction