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Blankfeld, Keren. Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story. Little, Brown. Jan. 2024. 416p. ISBN 9780316564779. $30. HISTORY

While imprisoned in Auschwitz, Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia fell in love, a passion they were able to sustainthroughout their horrific stay there. But they lost track of each other upon the camp’s liberation. They finally met again nearly 70 years later, with Zippi revealing a secret that had assured David’s survival at the camp. From former Forbes staff writer Blankfeld.

Debreczeni, József. Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. St. Martin’s. Jan. 2024. 256p. tr. from Hungarian by Paul Olchváry. ISBN 9781250290533. $28. Downloadable. HISTORY

A Hungarian-speaking journalist/poet who lived mostly in Yugoslavia, Debreczeni barely survived the gruesome selection process when he arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. After 12 months, he ended up in the so-called Cold Crematorium at the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. He was saved when the Germans abandoned the camp as the Allies closed in. Published in 1950 but never translated, Debreczeni’s memoir is now appearing in 15 languages worldwide. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. Scribner. Jan. 2024. 320p. ISBN 9781668002421. $28. HISTORY

A professor of renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter, UK, Gibson chronicles the worldwide persecution of people—primarily women—for witchcraft over the last several centuries. Of course, events in colonial Salem, MA, figure here, but the 13 trials featured range from an indigenous Sami woman on Norway’s Vardø island being accused of murder in the 1620s to the execution of local leaders by British colonial authorities in 1948 Lesotho.

Jackson, Jenn M. Black Women Taught Us. Random. Jan. 2024. 368p. ISBN 9780593243336. $28. Downloadable. HISTORY

A popular Teen Vogue columnist and multi-award-winning Syracuse University professor focusing on Black, women’s, and gender studies, Jackson offers 13 original essays exploring Black women writers and activists, ranging from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde. In particular, she wants to clarify how Black women have come together, thought through their lives, and built coalitions in the search for racial, gender, and sexual justice worldwide.

Johnston, Jake. Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle To Control Haiti. St. Martin’s. Jan. 2024. 384p. ISBN 9781250284679. $30. HISTORY

A senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Johnston looks to history as he explains why Haiti is in near-collapse today. After liberating itself from France in 1825, Haitians spend more than a century and millions of dollars compensating their former French enslavers; to this day, both U.S. and European business interests (often backed by military force) have sought to keep Haiti a place of cheap labor, high profits, and quiescent leaders. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Rothenberg, Ben. Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice. Dutton. Jan. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9780593472439. $32.50. BIOGRAPHY

A senior editor at Racquet magazine, sports journalist Rothenberg has been following Haitian American/Japanese player Naomi Osaka since she first emerged on the Women’s Tennis Association tour in 2014. Here he tracks a career that has included Osaka’s four Grand Slam singles championships and fierce advocacy of social justice and mental health issues.

Shatz, Adam. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Farrar. Jan. 2024. 464p. ISBN 9780374176426. $32. BIOGRAPHY

The leading activist intellectual of the postcolonial era whose writings remain foundational to today’s worldwide racial liberation movement, Frantz Fanon gets a full-scale biography from Shatz, the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books . Shatz moves from Fanon’s leaving Martinique to fight with the French during World War II, being drawn to existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon, practicing a psychiatry of “dis-alienation” in rural France and Algeria, and joining the Algerian independence struggle while writing classics like The Wretched of the Earth. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Steil, Benn. The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. Avid Reader: S. & S. Jan. 2024. 816p. ISBN 9781982127824. $40. HISTORY

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third-term vice president, progressive Henry Wallace lost his place on the 1944 Democratic ticket in an open convention that some observers have challenged as corrupt, even calling Harry Truman’s ascendancy to the presidency a catalyst to the Cold War. But Steil, author of the multi-award-winning The Marshall Plan, has dug through FBI, Soviet/Russian, and other archives to argue that Wallace was not as noble as his advocates proclaim, letting his self-obsession get in the way of good judgment.

White, Elizabeth B. & Joanna Sliwa. The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust. S. & S. Jan. 2024. 336p. ISBN 9781982189129. $28.99. HISTORY

While working as a welfare official in Lublin, Poland, during World War II, Jewish mathematician Josephine Janina Mehlberg used a Polish aristocrat’s identity papers to pass herself off as Countess Janina Suchodolska, thus rescuing more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by the Germans. Her story, partly drawn from her own unpublished memoir, is told by scholars White, recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and historian Sliwa of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

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