SCHINDLER'S ARK.

UK,8vo HB+dw/dj,1st edn. [A UK 1st edn,1st impression which precedes,by a few weeks,the Australian 1st edn.A 2nd impression was published October 1982.Book was the 1982 Booker Prize winning novel too.] FINE+/FINE.No owner inscrptn but price-clip to dw/dj.Bright,crisp,clean,glossy laminated,colour pictorial illustrated dw/dj,with pale grey+white lettering; with negligible shelf-wear or creasing to edges and corners - no nicks,tears or splits present.Spine/backstrip of dw/dj ubiquitously and slightly sunned/faded from it's original vibrant red.Top+fore-edges bright and clean - no foxing/spotting; contents bright, tight,clean,solid and sound - virtually pristine - no dog-ear reading creases to any pages' corners,would appear unread - apart from my own collation.Publisher's bright,crisp,clean,sharp-cornered,original plain black cloth boards with bright, crisp,blocked gilt letters to spine/backstrip and immaculate plain white endpapers. Book has NO lean or spine-roll - straight,square and tight.UK,8vo HB+ dw/dj,1st edn,9-432pp [paginated] includes author's note with his facsimile signature at it's conclusion,a prologue,38 chapters and an epilogue; plus [unpaginated] half-title+title pages,a glossary (SS Ranks and their Army equivalents) with b/w city street map (Cracow) to its verso,b/w street map with Ghetto inset map,with a b/w sketch map of K L PLASZOW (Schindler's Factory) to verso. Item presents as really superb and exceptional quality/condition of those I've handled - so far.
A highly collected Booker Prize winning author and this title will be an important and welcome addition to the Keneally/Booker Prize canon.
Drawing on his own extensive researches, Keneally takes us back into Nazi-occupied Poland,from where an extraordinary tale emerges - of an extraordinary man's mission to save the Jewish people.
On the face of it,lusty,worldly Oskar Schindler was a most unlikely missionary.He had moved to Cracow in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Poland to profit from the rich pickings to be had by the bold and by the Aryan.A big man in every sense,with an appetite to match,for success,for women and for drink, Schindler,a Sudeten German,thrived.He rapidly established himself as a powerful Cracow figure,head of a major industrial concern moulded from the ruins of threatened Jewish-run businesses,a dabbler in the black market - partly to keep himself and his mistress in the manner to which they were accustomed,partly for the hell of it - and a man with influential connections extending far outside Cracow.Schindler was a man who knew how to play his cards. Yet this was a man whose deeds by the end of the war were to have earned him a place on Mount Zion as one of the honoured dead of the Israeli nation.On the Avenue of Righteous People a tree bears his name. Schindler was to become a champion of the oppressed,the protector of the Jews,at a time when prudent people thanked their lucky stars for their birthright and kept their eyes averted.
Always a man of extravagant gestures,Schindler was to achieve a series of fantastic feats in his championing of 'his Jews',in fact of any Jew fortunate enough to come under his protection. What began as an instinctive distaste for the bully and the pervert was to develop into an increasingly fervent campaign as the anti- Jewish measures of the Nazis escalated.
Schindler succeeded in walking a tightrope between Nazi officials and Jewish contacts - a tightrope which involved him in playing cards for the life of a Jewish girl with the local camp commandant,laying out a personal fortune in bribes,and eventually led him to the gates of Ausschwitz to extract his chosen people from under the eyes of the infamous Mengele. . . 'Schindler's Ark' tells of the exceptional people that he attracted to himself,of the band of courageous women with whom he was involved - and of the nobility and sagacity of individuals whom he came to know among the Jewish people.But,above all,it exposes the strange quirk of fate,or of human character,which could produce in Schindler a mission to save and yet in others,often very similar in temperament,and equally far from sanity,a mission to exterminate.
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