[bksvol-discuss] The Great Escape Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
- From: Jamie Yates <jamieyates@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Bookshare Volunteers <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 15:46:38 -0800 (PST)
I just uploaded The Great Escape by Kati Marton.
The tale of nine men who grew up in Budapest's brief
Golden Age, then, driven from Hungary by
anti-Semitism, fled to the West, especially to the
United States, and changed the world. These nine men,
each celebrated for individual achievements, were
actually part of a unique group who grew up in a time
and place that will never come again. It is Marton's
extraordinary achievement to trace what for a few
dazzling years was common to all of them -- the magic
air of Budapest -- and show how their separate lives
and careers were, in fact, all shaped by Budapest's
lively café life before the darkness closed in.
Marton follows the astonishing lives of four
history-changing scientists, all just one step ahead
of Hitler's terror state, who helped usher in the
nuclear age and the computer (Edward Teller, John von
Neumann, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner); two major
movie myth-makers (Michael Curtiz, who directed
Casablanca, and Alexander Korda, who produced The
Third Man); two immortal photographers (Robert Capa
and Andre Kertesz); and one seminal writer (Arthur
Koestler, Darkness at Noon).
Marton follows these brilliant products of Budapest's
Golden Age as they flee fascism in the 1920s and 1930s
en route to sanctuary -- and immortality. As the
scientists labor in the secret city of Los Alamos in
the race to build the atom bomb, Koestler, once a
communist agent imprisoned by Franco, writes the most
important anticommunist novel of the century. Capa,
the first photographer to go ashore on D-Day, later
romances Ingrid Bergman and is acknowledged as the
world's greatest war photographer before his tragic
death in Vietnam. Curtiz not only gives us Casablanca,
consistently voted the greatest romantic movie ever
made, but also discovers Doris Day and directs James
Cagney in the quintessential patriotic film, Yankee
Doodle Dandy.
Ultimately, The Great Escape is an American story and
an important, previously untold chapter of the
tumultuous last century. Yet it is also a poignant
story -- in the words of the great historian Fritz
Stern, "an evocation of genius in exile . . . an
instructive, moving delight." An epilogue relates the
journey into exile of three members of the next
generation of Budapest exiles:
financier-philanthropist George Soros, Intel founder
Andy Grove, and 2002 Nobel laureate in literature Imre
Kertesz.
Jamie in Michigan
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