Join us for NPL's Just the Facts Book Group! This group selects and discusses nonfiction books. All are welcome.

PLEASE NOTE, THIS MONTH'S MEETING IS VIRTUAL. 

This event will be held on Zoom. Register online by clicking here or by calling 978-465-4428 x 242. A link will be emailed to participants automatically. If you do not receive a link, please email info@newburyportpl.org or call 978-465-4428 x242.

This month’s pick is Prisoners of the Castle : an epic story of survival and escape from Colditz, the Nazis' fortress prison, by Ben Macintyre.

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become a legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names - like the indomitable Pat Reid - share glory with lesser-known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar, whose ill treatment, hunger strike and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war's arc from within Colditz's stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler's war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis.

(Description summarized from catalog record.)