Searching for Schindler: A Memoir by Thomas Keneally
Keneally's new memoir begins with a chance encounter in a leather shop in Beverly Hills in 1980. The Australian novelist falls into conversation with the garrulous eastern European proprietor, a bear of a man called Leopold Pfefferberg, who ushers him into a back room and tells him “one of the greatest stories of humanity”. The extraordinary tale of Oskar Schindler, a heavy-drinking, womanising member of the Nazi party who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazi death camps by putting them to work in his factory, grips Keneally immediately. By the time he leaves Los Angeles, he has resolved to write it. Searching for Schindler is an account of the fortuitous discoveries and painstaking research that went into his acclaimed “factual novel” Schindler's Ark. Accompanied by the indefatigable Pfefferberg, Keneally hunts down the remaining survivors, travelling from New York's diamond district to the ravaged Jewish area in Krakow. Though much here is quite familiar, this is such a fascinating story, surrounded by so many enigmas that it is well worth another visit.

The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus by Justin Marozzi
For his first book, South from Barbary, Marozzi made a 1,200-mile journey across the Libyan Sahara by camel. Now the British historian has set himself the equally eccentric task of “travelling with Herodotus” - searching for traces of the Greek “Father of History” (author of the epic Histories) among the ruins of the ancient world. Marozzi makes a series of trips to Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece, retells Herodotus's tales and, taking his cue from the Greek himself, embarks on a series of entertaining though often unrelated digressions. He does struggle to link his discoveries back to his enigmatic travelling companion and sometimes the premise of his journey is lost amid his scattered musings. He travels, for instance, to the historian's hometown of Halicarnassus (now called Bodrum) only to launch into a brief history of underwater archeology. But the meat of this book is a spirited celebration of Herodotus as an early travel writer. More than anything it's a good excuse to return to his outlandish stories of war and the exotic sexual practices of forgotten cultures.

Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally
Sceptre £20 pp312
The Man who Invented History by Justin Marozzi
John Murray £25 pp326

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