Reddit mentions: The best prisoners of war history books

Here's 2 positions that you could explore:

1. "America's imperial past provoked the Japanese into WWII," more or less argued in IMPERIAL CRUISE
   
2. "It was morally right for Churchill/Roosevelt to forcefully repatriate anti-Soviet Russians back to the USSR after WWII, even though it likely meant certain death;" referring to the Cossacks and Soviets holding onto Allied prisoners

BTW, there's an NPR show called 1A that just did an interview with Colson Whitehead and one of the IRL survivors of the Dozier School, if anyone is interested. (Also, I asked my dad, and it doesn't seem like any of my bio relatives were sent there, but there was a guy my family kind of took in and raised, and he thought that he might have been sent to a reform school. He would have been one of the kids who was basically criminalized for being neglected/homeless.)

> What do you think about the white house? Do your thoughts change knowing that it was real up until very recently?

I'm not sure if I can describe my visceral feelings about it, but I read a book about stealthy/covert modern torture a long time ago, and many of the aspects that it talked about were (unsurprisingly) present in the book's description of the White House. It's done in places and with items of plausible deniability to others; torture is nothing like a "science" and never has been; "stealthy" torture is generally something torturers do when they think their actions might be scrutinized. (In this case, the torture obviously isn't stealthy in the sense of not leaving marks, but they do try to cover it up somewhat. There are also a lot of things they could have done to the boys during the "reform" periods that I won't list here.)

> How do you feel hearing the stories about the things the white kids did to get thrown in the reform school vs Elwood's accidental situation?

I thought it was kind of interesting and ironic that despite being a "good kid", Elwood's supposed crime was much worse than the supposed crimes of the other boys.

> >!Discuss your general thoughts and reaction to Griff's death!<

>!This is actually the one place where I thought the book stumbled a bit. Griff is honestly one of the less humanized characters in the book, at least among the non-villains, and I think that made my reaction to his murder kind of muted. The thing is, it's not really out of character for Elwood/Turner to think of him in the way that he does, but it makes it more difficult to think of him as a real/full person.!<

> How are y'all feeling about the book thus far? How's the reading going?

I wonder if secret kid in the infirmary was a sideways reference to that one really racist part of Catch-22. Actually, now I'm wondering if there are references to Catch-22 in other parts of the book too, it would be pretty apropos!

Elwood smiling and nodding and documenting all the corruption between the school and the town made me so proud of him <3

Also, I think it was around chapter 9 or 10 that I started to wonder if Turner was >!the ghost of a boy who had died there several decades earlier!<. (You will have to wait until the end to see if I was right :) )