The Pianist

The “striking” holocaust memoir that that inspired the Oscar-winning film “conveys with exceptional immediacy . . . the author’s desperate fight for survival” ( Kirkus Reviews ). 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 h