BOOK COVER
BOOK DETAILS
Pub Date: September 1, 2026
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Forge & Lantern Press
Page Count: 270
Format: Hardcover/Paperback/eBook
ISBN: 979-8-9970731-1-4 (HC) / 979-8-9970731-2-1 (PB) / 9798997073107 (eBook)
Price: $28.99 (HC), $18.99 (PB), $9.99 (ebook)
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Purple Heart Battalion by Top Shot Chris Cheng is a sweeping historical novel about love, honor, sacrifice, and the meaning of belonging in America.
After Pearl Harbor, Daniel Tanaka, a Japanese-American student at UC Berkeley, is forced into American incarceration with his family under Executive Order 9066. Despite losing his freedom, he volunteers to serve in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, where he must prove his loyalty on the battlefields of Italy and France while his family remains imprisoned behind barbed wire at home in America.
Over the past six years, Cheng immersed himself in the history of the 100th Infantry Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team through primary sources, military records, memoirs, and historical research. He traveled to Italy and France to walk the ground where these soldiers fought, bled, and died so as to describe those places as authentically as possible.
Inspired by the true story of the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. military history, The Purple Heart Battalion blends meticulous historical research with unforgettable characters to tell one of America’s greatest—and least known—World War II stories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Top Shot Chris Cheng is an American sports shooter, Second Amendment, AAPI & LGBT outreach advocate, and History Channel’s Top Shot Season 4 Champion. He is also the author of the memoir and guide for beginning shooters book, Shoot to Win.
Cheng is a self-taught amateur shooter who beat 17 professionals and won $100,000 along with the title of “Top Shot.” After his Top Shot win he quit his job at Google to pursue a fulltime professional marksmanship contract with Bass Pro Shops.
Cheng worked at Google from 2007 to 2012 in enterprise technical support, product policy, and program management. He returned to Silicon Valley in 2015 as a business executive in customer support & corporate security for Square.
He is an NRA-certified pistol, rifle, and shotgun instructor who volunteers his time advocating for LGBT, AAPI, and 2nd Amendment civil rights. Cheng serves on the board of directors for the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association (APAGOA), and the Pink Pistols.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in political science from UCLA and a Master’s degree in international policy from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
Cheng has appeared in various media outlets such as CNN, Fox News Channel, Fox Business, WSJ, The Washington Post and Katie Pavlich Tonight. He was also featured on the cover of RECOIL, Issue No. 56, sparking a national conversation about diversity, representation, and inclusion in the firearms community, particularly for LGBTQ+ and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) gun owners.
TIMELY TIE-INS
August
- Purple Heart Day – 7
- National Book Lovers Day – 9
October
- National Book Month
- National Storytelling Day – 5
- Paperback Book Day – 30
November
- National Novel Writing Month
- National Authors’ Day – Veterans Day – 11
December
- Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day – 7
SAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
- What was Executive Order 9066?
- Who was sent to the internment camps and why, after they were imprisoned, were they able to volunteer for military service?
- Why do you call them “incarceration camps” when most people know them as “internment camps”?
- What can the story of the 442nd teach us about unity in divided times?
- How did your unexpected journey from shooting competitions to writing about American history come about?
- What can historical fiction teach us about one of this country’s greatest civil liberties failures?
- How did an invitation to perform on national television lead you to dive deep into this story?
- What inspired you to turn this story into a historical novel?
- What led you to seek out Asian American heroes during Covid when anti-Asian hate was on the rise?
BOOK DETAILS
Pub Date: May 17, 2022
Genre: Memoir / Christian Inspirational
Publisher: She Writes Press
Page Count: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1647429003
Price: $15.99