Daniel James Brown (b. 1951) is an American New York Times bestselling author specializing in narrative nonfiction literature. Brown was born in California, attended Diablo Valley College, and graduate school at UC Berkley and UCLA. Brown began his writing career by teaching writing at San Jose State University; later he taught at Stanford. Subsequently, he focused on technical writing and editing.

Brown has written many nonfiction books, which often take as their subjects extremes of human endurance or other physical and psychological hurdles. His books include Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 (2006), The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (2009), and The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics (2013). He has received numerous awards such as the New York Times ”Editor’s Pick” for The Indifferent Stars Above and the 2014 Washington State Book Award for Nonfiction for The Boys in the Boat.

Solly Ganor (1928-2020) was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Lithuania. During World War II, Ganor’s family lived in the Kovno ghetto, facing deportations and Nazi atrocities. As the Red Army pushed westward toward the end of World War II, Ganor and his father were separated from his mother and sister Fanny, and were sent to the forced-labor camps in Germany.