[bksvol-discuss] Re: The Great Escape Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
- From: Grandma Cindy <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 17:50:07 -0800 (PST)
That sounds very interesting. It remind me of another
book I read recently, A Quiet American: The Secret War
of Varian Fry, by Andy Marino. Fry was a young
American who went to France and was instrumental in
organizing and group and arranging the escape from
Europe of a number of people, mostly Jewish but also
some whom the Germans wanted because they were
communists or socialists or just had spoken out
against Nazism and Hitler. Some were well-known
artists and authors and others were known in Europe
but I hadn't heard of them. It was a well-written,
not-too-long, and interesting book.
Cindy
--- Jamie Yates <jamieyates@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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 caf� 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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