Last night I finished reading Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles, America’s First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone. My first observation is that no matter how much I love my kindle, some books are just better with the layout intact. This book started, as the author points out in the afterward, as a picture book, and the images are very important. And the kindle version includes all the images, but the captions are not always on the same page as the image, and some of the images are so low resolution that zooming at all makes them useless. So the one thing that should be better in the electronic version, the ability to zoom in on the primary source images, is only sometimes possible.
The book traces the story of the Triple Nickles from the first jobs they had in the army (all service jobs) though their training and eventual deployment to fight fires on the west coast, rather than serving in combat.
I was familiar with most of the story (everything except the fire fighting) but it is well put together. For someone who did not know anything about African-Americans and their service in World War II, I thinkt the story would hang together well, even though there is plenty of background, which can feel like it interupts the story of the main characters.
Two of Castilleja's librarians told me they were turned off by the title, and I was hoping to find the phrase "Courage Has No Color" in a quotation, which would make the title more clear. I found the idea, but not the phrase. But given my husband's experience with editors and titles, it is clear the the author does not write the title, the marketing department does.
It is a good book, well researched, but I am not sure I would recommend it to anyone who was not already a fan of non-fiction about war, or African-American history.
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