While we at House of Cadmus mostly find the magic of reading woven within stories of fiction, there are a handful of nonfiction releases each year that pique our interest. Delving into history, these books often focus on periods and perspectives of particular interest to us. Whether it be previously unknown stories of World War II heroism or stories that tackle history through a feminist lens, these nonfiction books reveal pieces of history that are absolutely worth sharing.
Anticipated Nonfiction Book Releases of 2022
The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation
by Rosemary Sullivan
Publication Date January 18, 2022
Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teen-aged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent Anne to her death in a concentration camp. But despite the many works—journalism, books, plays and novels—devoted to Anne’s story, none has ever conclusively explained how the Franks and four other people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years—and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.
With painstaking care, former FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents—some never-before-seen—and interviewed scores of descendants of people involved, both Nazi sympathizers and resisters, familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the Franks’ arrest—and came to a shocking conclusion.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank is their riveting story. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behavior of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.
The Greek Histories
by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm
Publication Date: January 18, 2022
From the leading scholars behind The Greek Plays, a collection of the best translations of the foremost Greek historians, presenting a sweeping history of ancient Greece as recorded by its first chroniclers
“Just the thing to remind us that human history, though lamentably a work in progress, is always something we can understand better.”—Sarah Ruden, translator of The Gospels and author of The Face of Water
The historians of ancient Greece were pioneers of a new literary craft; their work stands among the world’s most enduring and important legacies and forms the foundation of a major modern discipline. This highly readable edition includes new and newly revised translations of selections from Herodotus—often called the “father of history”—Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the four greatest Greek innovators of historical narrative. Here the reader will find their most important, and most widely taught, passages collected in a single volume. The excerpts chart the landmark events of ancient Greece and provide a comprehensive account of the entire classical Greek age.
From the start the Greek historians demonstrated how broad and varied historical writing could be and brought their craft beyond a mere chronicle of past events. This volume explores each author’s interest in religion, leadership, character, and the lessons of war. How, for instance, should readers interpret Herodotus’ inclusion of speeches and dialogues, dreams, and oracles as part of the “factual” record? What did Thucydides understand about human nature that (as he said) stays constant throughout time? How did Plutarch frame historical biography as a means of depicting the moral qualities of great men?
Complete with introductions to the works of each historian, footnotes providing context and explaining obscurities, maps, and an appendix on the Greek conduct of war, this volume is an invaluable resource for students and passionate readers of history alike.
The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World
by Shelley Puhak
Publication Date: February 22, 2022
Brunhild was a Spanish princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet—in the 6th-century Merovingian Empire, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport—these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms for decades, changing the face of Europe.
The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a years-long civil war—against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne’s empire. Yet after Brunhild and Fredegund’s deaths—one gentle, the other horrific—their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend.
In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture’s stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world.
After the Romanovs
by Helen Rappaport
Publication Date: March 8, 2022
Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs.
Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers like Coco Chanel. Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers struggled in exile, eking out a living at menial jobs. Some, like Bunin, Chagall and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents from both sides plotted espionage and assassination. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty and their all-consuming homesickness for Russia, the homeland they had been forced to abandon.
The Secret Life of an American Codebreaker: Codebreaker Girls
by Jan Slimming
Publication Date: March 30, 2022
The Secret Life of an American Codebreaker is the true account of Janice Martin, a college student recruited to the military in 1943, after she was secretly approached by a college professor at Goucher College, a liberal arts establishment for women in Baltimore, USA. Destined for a teaching career, Janice became a prestigious professor of classics at Georgia State University, but how did she spend three years of her secret life during the war working in Washington D.C.’s Top Secret Intelligence?
Why was she chosen? How was she chosen? What did she do? Questions everyone asks are answered in this study of not just one but several Second World War codebreakers, male and female.
Backed by extensive research, unpublished photographs and recorded interviews, we discover the life of Janice Martin from Baltimore and her Top Secret Ultra role in helping to combat U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic; the work she and her colleagues undertook in a foundation provided by both British and American Intelligence. From ‘the early days’ to D-Day and beyond, the book includes other hidden figures who were part of this huge wheel of an incredible time in history.
The Double Life of Katharine Clark
by Katharine Gregorio
Publication Date: April 15, 2022
In 1955, Katharine Clark, the first American woman wire reporter behind the Iron Curtain, saw something none of her male colleagues did. What followed became one of the most unusual adventure stories of the Cold War.
While on assignment in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Clark befriended a man who, by many definitions, was her enemy. But she saw something in Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist leader who dared to question the ideology he helped establish, that made her want to work with him. It became the assignment of her life.
Against the backdrop of protests in Poland and a revolution in Hungary, she risked her life to ensure Djilas’s work made it past the watchful eye of the Yugoslavian secret police to the West. She single-handedly was responsible for smuggling his scathing anti-Communism manifesto, The New Class, out of Yugoslavia and into the hands of American publishers. The New Class would go on to sell three million copies worldwide, become a New York Times bestseller, be translated into over 60 languages, and be used by the CIA in its covert book program.
Meticulously researched and written by Clark’s great-niece, Katharine Gregorio, The Double Life of Katharine Clark illuminates a largely untold chapter of the twentieth century. It shows how a strong-willed, fiercely independent woman with an ardent commitment to truth, justice and freedom put her life on the line to share ideas with the world, ultimately transforming both herself―and history―in the process.
Do any of these nonfiction releases catch your eye?
All of them seem really interesting, but The dark queens have caught my eye!
Yes!! I’m especially excited about The Dark Queens, too!