Jeffrey B. Miller has been a writer, editor, and author for more than 40 years. His career includes starting six magazines (city, regional, and national), being editor-in-chief of five inflight magazines, and director of communications for AAA Colorado. He is also the author of Stapleton International Airport: The First Fifty Years (Pruett Publishing, Boulder, CO, 1983), which was the first history book about a major U.S. airport; and co-author with Dr. Gordon Ehlers of Facing Your Fifties: Every Man's Reference to Mid-life Health (M. Evans & Co., New York, 2002), which was one of only three health books that Publishers Weekly included in its Best Books of 2002. In 2014, his WWI nonfiction Behind the Lines (Milbrown Press) was published. It detailed the chaotic and complex beginnings of the largest food relief drive the world had ever seen -- where a small band of Americans in the nongovernmental Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) helped save from starvation nearly 10 million Belgians and northern French who were trapped in German-occupied territory. Behind the Lines earned inclusion in Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014 and the Kirkus Starred Review stated: An excellent history that should catapult Miller to the top tier or popular historians. (He's still waiting for the catapult!) Behind the Lines has also received numerous other national recognitions and reviews, and Miller was invited to speak at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. After three years of full-time research and writing (2015-2018), Miller finished WWI Crusaders (Milbrown Press), which tells the full story of the relief program in one volume. It follows a handful of young Americans who go into German-occupied Belgium, a 22-year-old Belgian woman, two U.S. diplomats, and two Belgians working in the underground. Miller became interested in this little-known incredible humanitarian relief program when his grandparents told him stories about it. His grandfather was one of the CRB men who went into German-occupied Belgium to supervise the relief efforts, and his grandmother was a 22-year-old Belgian woman who worked on the Belgian side of food relief. When they died in the 1980s, Miller received an inheritance of all their diaries, correspondence, and photos from WWI. That set Miller on a path of discovery not only about his family's role in the relief efforts, but also to learn more about the CRB, Belgium, and WWI. He ended up traveling across the country conducting research during multiple decades. He now has studied the lives of approximately 50 of the people who participated in the CRB. He has also studied the Belgian leaders of the underground newspaper, La Libre Belgique (The Free Belgium), and has included their story in WWI Crusaders. It has become Miller's passion and life's work to make sure America does not forget this tremendous story of heroism and humanity behind German lines. To honor all those who participated (willingly and unwillingly) in WWI, this new book, WWI Crusaders, will be officially published on November 11, 2018, which is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.
