(Atlas, 2002, 288 pages)

Engineers of the Soul is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of an ideology, in this case communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. Westerman’s sharp pen combines a fine example of investigative journalism with a dash of literary history. In the book’s ingenious construction he continually contrasts the Soviet past with present-day Russia, leading the reader into a maze of mirrors through Absurdistan.

(Atlas, 2004, 250 pages)

In december 1983, Frank Westerman, a 19-year-old student of tropical agriculture, visited a museum in a small Spanish village and found himself eye to eye with a stuffed black man in a glass display case. It was an experience that would remain with him for ever. Twenty years later, by then a well-known journalist and author, he set out to identify the man known simply as El Negro. The Negro. Who was he? When did he live? Where did he come from?

(Atlas, 2007, 284 pages)

As so often among Western Europeans, religion had slipped out of Frank Westerman’s life unnoticed - until he became a father and wondered which aspects of his own religious background and upbringing he wanted to pass on to his daughter. Ararat is a piece of highly personal journalism, splendidly combining Westerman’s own questions with the history of religion, political conflict and advances in scientific research.

(Atlas, 2008, 256 pages)

From time immemorial, the Dutch have owed their survival to pushing back the sea. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the dikes will be pierced and water let in once again. In the grain republic of Groningen where the clay is richest and the best grain harvested, the centuries-old polders will be flooded. The farming community, and with it a thousand-year-old tradition, will have to yield to environmental pressures and recreation.

(Atlas, 2010, 256 pages)

In Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse Frank Westerman explores the great human tragedies of the twentieth century through the story of a horse, the Lipizzaner. The stallion Conversano Primula, the pride of the manager of the dressage stable where Westerman learnt to ride as a boy, marks the start of an astonishing quest through the pure bloodlines of four generations of Viennese ‘school stallions’, to discover what they meant to the world’s most powerful leaders.

(De Bezige Bij, 2013, 250 pages)

On 21 August 1986, between nine and ten o’clock in the evening, 1,744 people, 3,952 cows, 82 dogs, 3,404 chickens, 8 cats, 552 goats, 337 sheep, 7 horses and 2 donkeys died in the Nyos Valley in Cameroon. The cause of their deaths remains a mystery to this day. Twenty-five years later, Frank Westerman went in search of stories told about the disaster by scien­tists, missionaries, locals and intellectu­als. Aside from the question of what happened, he wanted to know what people say about it.

(De Bezige Bij, 2016, 288 pages)

Should you talk to terrorists? Will they see reason? These are basic, important questions. In A Word, A Word, Frank Westerman links his own experiences of hostage situations with the latest ideas as to how best to react to terror. It resulted in a gripping reportage about one of the stickiest problems of our time.

(Querido Fosfor, 2018, 288 pages)

In We, Hominids, one of Holland’s leading narrative non-fiction writers hunts down answers to anthropology’s most fundamental questions: Who are we? What makes us different from animals? Using an ancient skull as ingress, traversing the globe, excavating the history of humankind and holding up evidence to the light, this investigation is a compelling mixture of reportage, travelogue and essay.

(Querido Fosfor, 2021, 284 pages)

Strange phenomena in the sky are the most popular omens of all time: the passage of comets, eclipses of the sun and moon, meteorite hits and stars that suddenly light up. The end must be nigh. Cosmology represents humankind’s ultimate reaching for the stars, whether with a telescope or a rocket. The Cosmic Comedy lifts off with the question why navigate the universe? Are we compensating for a lack? Emptiness? What do we expect to find on the moon or on Mars that we don’t have on Earth?