Pianist, The (The Pianist: the Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw) - Tapa blanda

"Stunning . . . Filled with unforgettable incidents, images, and people." --The Wall Street Journal "Remarkable . . . a document of lasting historical and human value." --The Los Angeles Times "Historically indispensible." --Washington Post Book World "The Pianist is a great book." --The Boston Globe "Even by the standards set be Holocaust memoirs, this book is a stunner." --Seattle Weekly "A stunning tribute to what one human being can endure, The Pianist is even more--a testimony to the redemptive power of fellow feeling." --The Plain Dealer "Distinguished by [Szpilman's] dazzling clarity . . . Remarkably lucid." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A striking Holocaust memoir that conveys with exceptional immediacy and cool reportage the author's desperate fight for survival." --Kirkus Reviews "The Pianist is a book so fresh and vivid, so heartbreaking, and so simply and beautifully written, that it manages to tell us the story of horrendous events as if for the first time . . . an altogether unforgettable book. " --The Daily Telegraph "Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir of life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the Jewish ghetto has a singular vividness. All is conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close." --The Observer "It is all told with a simple clarity that lodges the story in one's stomach through a mixture of disgust, terror, despair, rage, and guilt that grips the reader almost gently. " --The Spectator "Illuminates vividly the horror that overcame the Polish people. Szpilman's account has an immediacy, vivid and anguished." --The Sunday Telegraph

Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times, The Pianist is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody (Son of Sam). The Pianist won the Cannes Film Festival's most prestigious prize--the Palme d'Or. On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside--so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.