Schindler's Ark

Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction Schindler’s Ark Schindler’s List Working with the actual testimony of Schindler’s Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity. From From A mesmerizing novel based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industralist who saved and succored more than 1000 Jews from the Nazis at enormous financial and emotional expense. How the German Oskar Schindler came to save more than one thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust is one of the most fascinating stories of the century. Although millions are now learning about Schindler through Steven Spielberg’s recent Academy Award-winning film, his achievement first gained prominence with Keneally’s 1982 “facticious” novel (which is also the basis for the film). Keneally’s account is less melodramatic than the motion picture, and although he does not fully explain how a hedonistic German could have been so altered by the plight of the Jewish workers in his factory, he does make Schindler less enigmatic than the big-screen version. Ben Kingsley, one of the film's stars, reads in a calculatedly matter-of-fact tone, letting the story's power alone convey its complicated emotions. Highly recommended. Michael Adams, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Lib., Madison, N.J.