John Hersey

In 1943, the American Major Victor Joppolo finds himself the civil affairs officer-the mayor-of a small town in Sicily. Equipped with the rulebook, How to Bring American Democracy to Liberated Territories, he sets about bringing choices to a people whose every recent activity had been dictated. Asking them what the town needs most, he is answered: give the town back its spirit-a bell to replace the 700-year-old one that was melted down for bullets....

The Wall tells the inspirational story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an symbol of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with cruelty, torture, starvation and humiliation.