Geraldine Brooks Photo by Randi Baird

Geraldine Brooks got the idea for her new book, People of the Book: A Novel (2008), while covering the Bosnian war as a foreign correspondent. She tells the story of a book – the 500 year old Sarajevo Hagadah, which was saved by its Muslim Kustos during the Yugoslavian war and which is being inspected by Hanna Heath, a 30-year-old Australian book conservator, who has been called in by the United Nations to help preserve it. While these parts read like a thriller, it is the historical chapters which open up the history of the persecution of Jews in medieval Europe up until World War II. It’s the “people of the book”, among them not jut Jews, but also Muslims and Christians, who over five centuries saved it, passed it on, and cherished it, people who "had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war."

Tony Horwitz Photo by Randi Baird

In A Voyage Long and Strange (2008) Tony Horowitz uses the research skills of a journalist to follow the path of a historian in order to explore American history that never made it into history books.  It is a great US studies resource about the forgotten European explorers who tramped around North America between 1492 and the Pilgrims in 1620.  He also manages to talk a lot about the modern-day cities he passes through tracing the steps of the early explorers.  He points out that most early US history was written by New Englanders, from their perspective, so the Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese were largely written out, or just touched on as vague wanderers who really didn’t accomplish much.  But, in fact, they had walked through and explored the area of over 20 future US states by the time the Pilgrims arrived.