Books like The Nuremberg Women

I'm an author, broadcaster and public historian specialising in women’s experiences during the Second World War. While courage and sacrifice are often recognised, the effectiveness of the women who served is less frequently acknowledged. Popular culture tends to focus on glamour, yet these women were motivated by the same patriotism and sense of duty as men, while facing sexism, unequal pay, and fewer protections. Through my books and public history work, I aim to restore recognition of their achievements. This has included securing portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, public sculptures, and an English Heritage Blue Plaque. I regularly contribute to BBC television and radio, and my books have won or been shortlisted for major literary, historical, and biography prizes.

I'm an author, broadcaster and public historian specialising in women’s experiences during the Second World War. While courage and sacrifice are often recognised, the effectiveness of the women who served is less frequently acknowledged. Popular culture tends to focus on glamour, yet these women were motivated by the same patriotism and sense of duty as men, while facing sexism, unequal pay, and fewer protections. Through my books and public history work, I aim to restore recognition of their achievements. This has included securing portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, public sculptures, and an English Heritage Blue Plaque. I regularly contribute to BBC television and radio, and my books have won or been shortlisted for major literary, historical, and biography prizes.

I'm an author, broadcaster and public historian specialising in women’s experiences during the Second World War. While courage and sacrifice are often recognised, the effectiveness of the women who served is less frequently acknowledged. Popular culture tends to focus on glamour, yet these women were motivated by the same patriotism and sense of duty as men, while facing sexism, unequal pay, and fewer protections. Through my books and public history work, I aim to restore recognition of their achievements. This has included securing portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, public sculptures, and an English Heritage Blue Plaque. I regularly contribute to BBC television and radio, and my books have won or been shortlisted for major literary, historical, and biography prizes.

I'm an author, broadcaster and public historian specialising in women’s experiences during the Second World War. While courage and sacrifice are often recognised, the effectiveness of the women who served is less frequently acknowledged. Popular culture tends to focus on glamour, yet these women were motivated by the same patriotism and sense of duty as men, while facing sexism, unequal pay, and fewer protections. Through my books and public history work, I aim to restore recognition of their achievements. This has included securing portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, public sculptures, and an English Heritage Blue Plaque. I regularly contribute to BBC television and radio, and my books have won or been shortlisted for major literary, historical, and biography prizes.

I am a tired activist and recovering attorney. My professional focus on violence and humanity’s response to it began when, as a seven-year-old, the nuns at my Catholic school showed us newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. This led me to adopt as my life’s guiding principle Julian Beck’s admonition “to redeem our share of the universal cruelty.” After 20 years in the U.S. Violence Against Women Movement, I absconded to the former Yugoslavia and found myself in the middle of a war during which I ran a war crimes documentation project (memoir in progress). I later reported on the international war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

I’ve had a life-long interest in genocide dating back to my teenage years, when I read Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Murderers Among Us. Wiesenthal introduced me to the idea that governments sometimes murdered innocent people and could elude justice for their crimes. The question of human evil interacted with my theological interest in the problem of evil generally. Both genocide scholars and theologians were posing similar questions: how could people or God permit the occurrence of wanton evil when it was in their power to avoid it? And what should we do about genocide after it has happened? These questions launched my research into genocide and continue to fuel my study of this topic.

I grew up in part in Chile, and when the Pinochet dictatorship started killing and torturing people, I wanted to do something about it. Years later, as a professor of international law, I helped countries figure out what to do after mass atrocities. Seeing how trials in other countries – or in international criminal courts – could break through barriers and make it possible to bring those who killed, tortured, or disappeared thousands of people to justice gave me hope. I wanted to tell the stories of the brave people who overcame the odds to do justice, in a readable and exciting way that also explained the legal and political issues involved. 

As a long-time reader of mysteries, thrillers, and pulp fiction, I’ve lived a double life. By day, a scholar and a serious biographer, tackling heavyweight literary subjects, fighting the good feminist fight. By night, I devoured crime writing as a secret pleasure. Writing my book confirmed my belief that there have always been authors who transform genre fiction into literary magic – and that I could have fun telling their stories. Whether in my writing or mentoring, I want to celebrate neglected creators and explore how literary magic is made. The authors in this list are brave, authentic, and a damn good read. I wish you the joy of them all!

In my graduate studies, I had a fantastic professor who was able to make the politics of international criminal justice one of my favorite subjects. The intersection of law, politics, peace, and conflict pulled me in. But the fact that it also touches on human rights, state sovereignty, and the prevention of mass atrocities got me hooked. I ended up doing extensive research on the International Criminal Court and how it interacts with UN peace operations, and I have subsequently been teaching peace and justice at Leiden University. I publish regularly on these topics as well and am the associate editor of International Peacekeeping, one of the leading journals on international conflict management. 

I'm the author of several books on this topic and work on this topic as executive director of a nonprofit organization. I see war as one of the dumbest things that we could easily stop doing and as one of the most damaging things we do. It's the reason we are at risk of nuclear apocalypse, the leading cause of homelessness, a leading cause of death and injury, the justification for government secrecy, one of the most environmentally destructive activities, the major barrier to global cooperation on non-optional crises, and one of the main pits into which massive resources are diverted that we all desperately need for useful things.