Every month this group's book club (the Armchair Adventure Book Club) reads a book and has a book club meeting.
The book for June 2026 is: Arizona Goes to War: The Home Front and the Front Lines during World War II (2003), edited by Brad Melton and Dean Smith.
It is not a long book! The text is fairly large. It has a ton of pictures, diagrams, maps, etc. It is not. a single narrative, but a collection of chapters about different aspects of how Arizona was involved in World War II.
If anybody has not read it yet, or if you want to read it again, we can get together and read it one evening.
This book may have been difficult to get from local libraries. There is no movie adaptation. There is no audio book. We can get together for one evening and read the book and be 100% prepared for the book club meeting on the last Wednesday of June.
Can I Come to the Book Reading Event Even if I Do Not Plan to Attend the Book Club Meeting? Yes!
Do I Need To Bring Anything? No. The host has a copy of the book. If you have a copy, feel free to bring it. But it is not necessary.
Who Will Read The Book Aloud? Anybody who wants to. If you want to read out loud, you may be one of the readers. If you don't want to read, you may simply listen.
About the Book: Arizona Goes to War takes readers back to a time when military installations sprang up all over the state as thousands of airmen arrived to train in Arizona's clear desert skies, and when soldiers destined for North Africa came to get their first taste of desert sands. In its pages, readers will learn not only of the green recruits who passed through Arizona, but also of the state's Native Americans who registered for the draft in record numbers, of Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated in desert detention centers, and of ordinary citizens who did their bit for the war effort. Included in the book are some of World War II's most incredible stories, such as the testing of tank engines in Arizona dust storms for the North Africa campaign, the interrogation of Japanese consular diplomats from Honolulu at the Triangle T Guest Ranch near Dragoon, and the escape of 25 German POWs from a detention camp outside of Phoenix—called the greatest escape by Axis prisoners from a U.S. compound during the war. A separate chapter pays tribute to Arizona's war heroes: not only Silvestre Herrera, but also fighter ace Grant Turley, Midway hero John C. Butler, and Pima Indian Ira Hayes, who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. A host of profiles and sidebars bring people and events of the wartime era to life, and a useful appendix provides a traveler's guide to Arizona's World War II sites.