Donald L. Miller Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Donald L. Miller
Donald L. Miller was born in 1944 and is an American historian and biographer. He’s written New York Times bestselling nonfiction books, and is one of the most respected authorities on American history and World War II.

He is a frequent adviser and consultant to historical productions including those for HBO and PBS. These include “American Experience: The Bombing of Germany” (2010, PBS), “WWII in HD” (2009, History Channel), “American Experience: Victory in the Pacific (2005, PBS), “A Biography of America” (PBS), and several other programs airing on the History Channel.

He got his PhD from the University of Maryland and he joined the Lafayette College faculty in 1978. He’s also taught at Cornell University’s School for Industrial and Labor Relations, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Oxford University. He’s the recipient of this honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from St. Vincent College and Outstanding Alumni awards from Ohio University and University of Maryland.

“Masters of the Air” was adapted into an Apple TV+ series that was created by John Orloff and John Shiban.

Donald has won six awards for excellence in teaching, five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other awards like Victorian Society’s Book of the Year; the Great Lakes National Book Award for Outstanding Book, WWII Magazine; and Van Arsdalen Award for Outstanding Research. He was a resident scholar at All Souls College, Oxford, and he was also named the Crayenborgh Lecturer at Leiden University, Netherlands.

“City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America” is a non-fiction book that was released in 1996. The epic of Chicago is the tale of the emergence of modern America. Witness here Chicago’s own growth from this desolate fur trading post during the 1830s to one of the world’s most explosively alive cities by 1900.

Donald’s powerful narrative embraces all of it: Chicago’s wild start, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (like the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, community of young journalists and writers, its empire building businessmen, rich mix of cultures, world transforming architecture, and staggering engineering projects, like the reversal of the Chicago River and raising the whole city from prairie mud in order to save it from its devastating cholera epidemics.

The saga of Chicago’s unresolved struggle between control and growth, freedom and order, community and capitalism, remains instructive for our time, while we seek out ways to build and then maintain cities which retain their humanity without sacrificing their energy.

This book throbs with the pulse of the great city that it’s brilliantly bringing to life.

“D-Days in the Pacific” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2005. Even though many people associate the term D-Day with the Normandy invasion that happened on June 6, 1944, it’s military code for the start of any offensive operation. In the Pacific theater during World War II, there were over a hundred D-Days. The biggest and final one was the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, which brought together the largest invasion fleet that’s ever been assembled, much bigger than the one engaged in the Normandy invasion.

“D-Days in the Pacific” tells the epic tale about the campaign that American forces waged to win the Pacific Islands back from Japan. Based on the eyewitness accounts by the combatants, this covers the whole Pacific struggle from the attack on Pearl Harbor to dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The Pacific war was largely a seaborne offensive which was fought over some immense distances. A lot of the amphibious assaults on Japanese held islands were among some of the most savagely fought battles in American history: Okinawa, Leyte Gulf, Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa.

“Masters of the Air” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2007. This is the deeply personal tale of the American bomber boys from World War II that brought the war right to Hitler’s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes the reader on this harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Dresden, Berlin, and Hanover and he describes the horrible cost of bombing for the German people.

Fighting at 25,000 feet in freezing and thin air which no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews fought new sorts of assaults on mind and body. Air combat was lethal yet intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fear and fire. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys drank beer in local pubs, slept on clean sheets, and danced to the swing music played by Glenn Miller’s Air Force band, who toured US air bases in England. However they had a far greater chance of dying than the ground soldiers. In 1943, this American bomber crewman stood just a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, 25 missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the whole US Marine Corps.

The bomber crews were this elite group of warriors that were just a microcosm of America, white America, at least. (African Americans could only serve in a support capacity.) Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, as was “the King of Hollywood” Clark Gable. And William Wyler (an Oscar winning director) filmed the air and covered by reporters like Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of the whole war, a war within a war. Until Allied Soldiers crossed into Germany during the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside of the German homeland.

“Masters of the Air” is a story about life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It concludes with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches that captured airmen were forced to make close to the end of the war through the country that their bombs destroyed.

This book, drawn from oral histories, recent interviews, and German, American, British, and other archives, is a deeply moving and authoritative account of the world’s first and only bomber war.