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I like to explore the hidden corners of the world in my writing, telling unusual stories about history, science, and the human experience: from besieged beekeepers in North Dakota to Victorian wraiths in the American Southwest, to endangered species crusaders across the globe who are trying, against all cold logic and probability, to save the rarest creatures on earth.
I love talking to readers! It is so heartening to know that people are reading and connecting with your work and the subject matter. I write to share stories, and there is nothing I like better than talking about those stories with engaged readers.
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La Posada—“place of rest”—was once a grand Santa Fe mansion. It belonged to Abraham and Julia Staab, who emigrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. After they died, the house became a hotel. And in the 1970s, the hotel acquired a resident ghost—a sad, dark-eyed woman in a long gown. Strange things began to happen there: vases moved, glasses flew, blankets were ripped from beds. Julia Staab died in 1896—but her ghost, they say, lives on.
In American Ghost, Julia’s great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestor’s transfiguration from nineteenth-century Jewish bride to modern phantom. Family diaries, photographs, and newspaper clippings take her on a riveting journey through three hundred years of German history and the American immigrant experience. With the help of historians, genealogists, family members, and ghost hunters, she weaves a masterful, moving story of fin-de-siècle Europe and pioneer life, villains and visionaries, medicine and spiritualism, imagination and truth, exploring how lives become legends, and what those legends tell us about who we are.
“A haunting story about the long reach of the past.”
— Maureen Corrigan, NPR’S Fresh Air
Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America’s foremost migratory beekeepers, and the myriad and mysterious epidemics threatening American honeybee populations. In luminous, razor-sharp prose, Nordhaus explores the vital role that honeybees play in American agribusiness, the maintenance of our food chain, and the very future of the nation. With an intimate focus and incisive reporting, in a book perfect for fans of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, and John McPhee’s Oranges, Nordhaus’s stunning exposé illuminates one the most critical issues facing the world today, offering insight, information, and, ultimately, hope.
“You’ll never think of bees, their keepers, or the fruits (and nuts) of their labors the same way again.”
—Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters
