As England braced for a life-or-death struggle against Germany in the summer of 1940, most Americans knew more about baseball than the bombs about to fall on London.

Not Phil Leckrone. The tall, handsome and gregarious pilot from a small town in downstate Illinois had a taste for fast cars--and faster airplanes. More than a year before Pearl Harbor brought America into World War II, Leckrone left his wife and two small children--risking loss of citizenship, jail time, and hefty fines--to sneak across the Canadian border and join the Royal Air Force.

Now, for the first time in 80 years, Leckrone's story has been brought to life in this meticulously researched biography.

Full Measure of Devotion is a scholarly yet vivid portrait that follows Phil Leckrone from his birth in a rural Illinois community to his tragic death in a flying accident near London after the Battle of Britain concluded.

History specialists and generalists alike will appreciate Full Measure of Devotion as a timeless story of one man's heroic courage and the somber debt owed to those who answer the call to protect free nations from tyranny.

Slow Ball Cartoonist takes readers on a journey to an earlier era in America when cartoonists played a pivotal role each day in enabling major daily newspapers to touch the lives of their readers. No American cartoonist was more influential than the Chicago Tribunes John T. McCutcheon, the plainspoken Indiana native and Purdue University graduate whose charming and delightful cartoons graced the pages of the newspaper from 1903 until his retirement in 1946.

This book chronicles McCutcheons adventure-filled life, from his birth on a rural small farm near Lafayette in 1870, to his rise as the Dean of American Cartoonists. His famous cartoon, Injun Summer, originally published in 1907, was a celebration of autumn through childlike imagination and made an annual appearance in the Tribune each fall for decades. McCutcheon was the first Tribune staff member to earn the coveted Pulitzer Prize for his poignant 1931 cartoon about a victim of bank failure at the height of the Great Depression. Born with an itch for adventure, McCutcheon served as a World War I correspondent, combat artist, occasional feature writer, portrait artist, and world traveler.

While the gangly and tall McCutcheon looked the part of the down-home characters featured in his cartoons, the world-wise flavor of his work influenced public opinion while making readers smile. Hard-hitting and even vicious attacks on public figures were common among his contemporaries; however, McCutcheons gentle humor provided a change in pace, thus prompting a colleague to borrow a phrase from baseball and anoint him the slow ball cartoonist.

Slow Ball Cartoonist is a timeless story about a humble man who made the most of his talents and lived life to the fullest, being respectful and fair to allincluding the targets of his cartoonists pen.

Indiana native Paul Baer was an American pilot of many firsts. Born into a modest midwestern family in the late 1800s, Baer grew up short and shy in Fort Wayne. Not short on ambition, he volunteered to join a new breed of combatant: the fighter pilot. Dogfighting in the skies over France during World War I, Baer earned a giant reputation as the first-ever American to shoot down an enemy plane and the first to earn the title of combat ace for earning five victories--before being shot down himself. Author Tony Garel-Frantzen celebrates the 100th anniversary of Baer's aerial heroics with rarely seen images, a previously unpublished POW letter from Baer himself and a look at the restless raptor's life of roaming.

A Nazi businessman and a Christian missionary form an unlikely alliance when an invading army turns their lives in China into a life-or-death struggle...

Author Tony Garel-Frantzen delivers again, this time with his debut novel, Nightmare in Nanking-a vivid and sprawling adventure based on the unforgettable true story of America's Minnie Vautrin and Germany's John Rabe, two strangers whose paths cross unexpectedly when they come face-to-face with unimaginable atrocities in Nanking on the eve of World War II in the Pacific.

Nightmare in Nanking is a fresh milestone account of Vautrin's life beginning with her birth in the late 19th century in a tiny prairie town on the Illinois frontier. Readers will revel in the stirringly authentic recounting of Vautrin's struggle to break free of Victorian conventions that shackled women of her era and the quirks of fate that caused her life to intertwine with a bookish-looking Nazi-John Rabe of Hamburg.

Armed only with courage and intractable moral willpower, Vautrin and Rabe are thrust over and over again into cliffhanger confrontations against barbaric soldiers intent on killing Chinese men and heinously hunting Chinese women and girls to rape, torture, and murder their prey.

Set against the exotic vista of late-1930's China, Nightmare in Nanking is a triumph of imaginative storytelling sculpted from two years of extensive research. Readers will be deeply affected by this timeless tale of how personal bravery brandished in the face of evil saved tens of thousands of Chinese non-combatants-but left two very different souls who grew up a world apart indelibly branded and irreversibly doomed in the process.

Indiana native Paul Baer was an American pilot of many firsts. Born into a modest midwestern family in the late 1800s, Baer grew up short and shy in Fort Wayne.

Not short on ambition, he volunteered to join a new breed of combatant: the fighter pilot. Dogfighting in the skies over France during World War I, Baer earned a giant reputation as the first-ever American to shoot down an enemy plane and the first to earn the title of combat ace for earning five victories--before being shot down himself. Author Tony Garel-Frantzen celebrates the 100th anniversary of Baer's aerial heroics with rarely seen images, a previously unpublished POW letter from Baer himself and a look at the restless raptor's life of roaming.