Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook20 hours
The Last Thing You Surrender
Written by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Narrated by Bill Andrew Quinn
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this audiobook
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?
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?
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Reviews for The Last Thing You Surrender
Rating: 4.428571496428572 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
28 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Phenomenal! Well told and extremely engaging! I love this book!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow! This was an excellent book. I highly recommend it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have never loved a book more. This is a difficult read, but so important. The history was woven so expertly into a Fiction novel. It explains the what was happening at the time between races during WWII. I saw someone asked “What book changed your life?” recently on social media. While I think “changing my life” is a stretch, I definitely think this gave me a different perspective and details I didn’t know before reading the novel that will stay with me long after I have read it.