SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
This powerful audiobook highlights the evil of the Nazis as told through the powerful letters between two friends, Martin and Max, whose lives and relationship are destroyed by the regime. Ably read by Rob Shapiro and George Newbern, this 68-minute novel grabs the listener from the start and never lets go. Shapiro and Newbern read the letters between Max, an art dealer who is forced to leave Germany, and Martin, his friend and former colleague, who must hide the letters to avoid the tyranny engulfing him. As the communications evolve, so too does the intensity of the performance, culminating in the audiobook’s extraordinary ending. Few books of any length are more compelling or memorable. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
Simple, warm, human and tremendously touching. It will take hold of both head and heart.” — Los Angeles Times
“What must be emphasized here is that this is no merely sound journalistic piece. It is a great story regardless of time or place or immediate circumstances. It is a great story because it contains all the elements of storytelling that have gone to make great stories from time immemorial.” — Fred T. Marsh, New York Herald Tribune
“A tremendously powerful piece of work, with a wallop at the end of the kind that Poe, Maupassant, Ibanez, Bierce and O. Henry made famous in their time.” — Joseph Henry Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle
“A short story with a long, dark echo; fierce, clever, and timely in today’s world.” — Julian Barnes
“This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction.” — New York Review of Books
“A tale already known and profoundly appreciated by members of my generation. It is to our part in World War II what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the Civil War.” — Kurt Vonnegut
“That this short, fleeting story has lasted so long is not only because of its artistic achievement, and not only because, written in 1938, it astonishingly anticipated the horror that was yet to come. It is because its prescience is not confined to its time. It saw into our own future too.” — Jonathan Freedland
“Captivating, beautiful and unimaginably powerful, a book for our times.” — Philippe Sands
“Address Unknown serves not only as a reminder of Nazi horrors but as a cautionary tale in light of current racial, ethnic, and nationalistic intolerance.” — Publishers Weekly
“Address Unknown will leave you breathless with admiration.” — Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Remarkably, despite the multitude of testimony and first-person accounts of life under Nazism with which we’ve been deluged since its first publication, this old, slim fiction manages to smuggle us across time and space into one eloquent tale of perfidy.” — The Guardian
“This stunning classic brilliantly defines what happens when people are swept up in a poisonous ideology.” — Daily Mail (London)
"[An] astounding work. . . . One aspect of a story's greatness is its ability to speak to readers of different ages. So it is with Address Unknown. . . . I'm hopeful . . . it will reclaim its place on [the] American bookshelf." — American Scholar
Fred T. Marsh
What must be emphasized here is that this is no merely sound journalistic piece. It is a great story regardless of time or place or immediate circumstances. It is a great story because it contains all the elements of storytelling that have gone to make great stories from time immemorial.”
Jonathan Freedland
That this short, fleeting story has lasted so long is not only because of its artistic achievement, and not only because, written in 1938, it astonishingly anticipated the horror that was yet to come. It is because its prescience is not confined to its time. It saw into our own future too.”
Joseph Henry Jackson
A tremendously powerful piece of work, with a wallop at the end of the kind that Poe, Maupassant, Ibanez, Bierce and O. Henry made famous in their time.”
Daily Mail (London)
This stunning classic brilliantly defines what happens when people are swept up in a poisonous ideology.”
The Guardian
Remarkably, despite the multitude of testimony and first-person accounts of life under Nazism with which we’ve been deluged since its first publication, this old, slim fiction manages to smuggle us across time and space into one eloquent tale of perfidy.”
|Los Angeles Times
Simple, warm, human and tremendously touching. It will take hold of both head and heart.”
Kurt Vonnegut
A tale already known and profoundly appreciated by members of my generation. It is to our part in World War II what Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the Civil War.”
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Address Unknown will leave you breathless with admiration.”
Philippe Sands
Captivating, beautiful and unimaginably powerful, a book for our times.”
American Scholar
"[An] astounding work. . . . One aspect of a story's greatness is its ability to speak to readers of different ages. So it is with Address Unknown. . . . I'm hopeful . . . it will reclaim its place on [the] American bookshelf."
New York Review of Books
This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction.”
Julian Barnes
A short story with a long, dark echo; fierce, clever, and timely in today’s world.”
Los Angeles Times
Simple, warm, human and tremendously touching. It will take hold of both head and heart.”
Library Journal
08/01/2021
A sensation when it first appeared in 1938, Taylor's powerful story alerted a complacent, isolationist United States to the rising Nazi menace (alas, too late), all in the guise of a grimly satisfying thriller, easily digested over a lunch hour. Through a sequence of letters starting in 1932 between Max Eisenstein, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and his business partner Martin Schulse, newly repatriated to his native Munich, we witness with alarming immediacy the insidious progress of fascist ideology. Reluctant at first ("Is he quite sane?"), Martin soon falls under the resistless, dehumanizing sway of Germany's "Glorious Leader," opening a perilous chasm between the friends. With masterful economy, Taylor (1903–96) uses the silences between letters to disturbing and ultimately devastating effect. VERDICT At perhaps no time since its initial publication has this stunning evocation of extremism and intolerance felt more chilling. As the foreword to the 1938 edition suggested, this story deserves a permanent place on the country's bookshelf.
SEPTEMBER 2021 - AudioFile
This powerful audiobook highlights the evil of the Nazis as told through the powerful letters between two friends, Martin and Max, whose lives and relationship are destroyed by the regime. Ably read by Rob Shapiro and George Newbern, this 68-minute novel grabs the listener from the start and never lets go. Shapiro and Newbern read the letters between Max, an art dealer who is forced to leave Germany, and Martin, his friend and former colleague, who must hide the letters to avoid the tyranny engulfing him. As the communications evolve, so too does the intensity of the performance, culminating in the audiobook’s extraordinary ending. Few books of any length are more compelling or memorable. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
