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About this episode:

How many history books have kept you up late into the night, turning the page to find out what happens next? That’s exactly what the newest book from this episode’s guest did to Kate, but it was well worth the lost sleep.

Catherine Grace Katz joins the Drafting the Past podcast to talk about her newest book, Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War. Catherine is a writer, historian, and lawyer, with degrees in history from Harvard and Cambridge along with a JD from Harvard. Her first book was Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War.

She joined Kate to talk about what goes into writing such extraordinary true stories, from how she works without an outline to the writing tool she found in her mom’s basement, and the unlikely inspiration for the book in a classic holiday movie.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Catherine’s website
• Catherine Grace Katz, Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War
• Catherine Grace Katz, Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War
• William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
• William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary
• Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire
• Gioia Diliberto, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition
• Tana French
• Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
• Phillippe Sands, The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive, and the podcast precursor, Intrigue: The Ratline
• Helena Merriman, Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berline Wall and its podcast precursor, Intrigue: Tunnel 29
• The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O’Meara
• Pitch Club