"Stunning...Filled with unforgettable incidents, images, and people."--The Wall Street Journal
"Remarkable...A document of lasting historical and human value."--
Los Angeles Times "Historically indispensable."--
The Washington Post "
The Pianist is a great book."--
The Boston Globe "Even by the standards set by 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 "[
The Pianist] joins the ranks of Holocaust memoirs notable as much for their literary value as for their historical significance...Szpilman is a remarkably lucid observer and chronicler."--
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A striking Holocaust memoir that conveys with exceptional immediacy and cool reportage the author's desperate fight for survival. This is also a book about the power of music, which provides Szpilman the determination to go on."--
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A richly detailed and absorbing work...fascinating for its detail...illuminating and astonishing."--
Rain Taxi "
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 (UK)
"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 (UK)
"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 (UK)
"Illuminates vividly the horror that overcame the Polish people. Szpilman's account has an immediacy, vivid and anguished."--
The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
"Even if you saw the 2003 film about a Jewish pianist who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the immediacy of this autobiographical account by the musician himself is absolutely gripping. Unlike the majority of Holocaust survivors, who allowed themselves time to take stock, absorb and even come to terms with the past, Szpilman didn't wait. His book was published in 1946, when his grief and his physical and mental suffering were still raw."--Sue Arnold,
The Guardian (UK)
