The last of my travels in 2014 recently took me to Boston to visit my son. Boston has become one of my favorite cities. Aside from counting my son among its citizens, it holds and honors an impressive history. The city is walkable, its distinctive neighborhoods layered in varied cultures with sights, sounds, aromas and tastes telling tales of the people who formed this great metropolis.

Boston lights the imagination of writers. It shows up in a lot of great books, either setting the stage for a story or taking center stage as a personality. It is never chosen by chance or default. Even in non-fiction, stories set in Boston have a certain “feel” they could not get from any other city.

Here are some Boston-based books worth checking out:

Fiction:
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
An Old Fashioned Girl – Louisa May Alcott
Summer – Edith Wharton
The Late George Apley – John P Marquand
The Last Hurrah – Edwin O’Connor
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Still Alice – Lisa Genova

Non-Fiction:
The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
Boston Firsts: 40 Feats of Innovation and Invention That Happened First in Boston and Helped Make America Great – Lynda Morgenroth

For Children:
Make Way for Ducklings – Robert McCloskey
Johnny Tremain – Esther Forbes

A dozen years ago, the United States was stunned on a gorgeous September morning and freedom as we knew it was forever changed. The images and emotions of that day and the weeks that followed remain fresh in our minds. But 9/11 was not the first surprise attack on the U.S. The day that, in President Franklin Roosevelt’s words, “will live in infamy,” happened 70 years earlier, on December 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor is in our collective distant mirror now. There are few people left who experienced those years firsthand, the events that significantly transformed both the United States and Japan. Fortunately, literature from and about that time in history is available to us. To understand who we are as a nation today and guide us in the critical decisions we must make in response to modern threats – whether real or imagined – we can turn to books that were written about the people, the times and the lessons we needed to learn when war first came to our shores. Here are some of the best:

Non-Fiction:
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor – Gordon W. Prange
Day of Infamy – Walter Lord

Fiction:
Battle Cry – Leon Uris
From Here to Eternity – James Jones
Winter of the World (The Century Trilogy #2) – Ken Follett

For Children:
Baseball Saved Us – Ken Mochizuki