Promotional Information

From the bestselling author of Schindler's List.

About the Author

Thomas (Tom) Keneally was born in Sydney in 1935. Of Irish descent, he trained for several years for the Catholic priesthood but did not take orders. He worked as a school teacher, clerk and drama teacher. In the mid-1960s Keneally embarked on an extraordinary career as a writer, with remarkable success in Australia and overseas. He has won many prestigious literary awards. He won the Booker Prize in 1982 and has won the Miles Franklin Award twice. Humphrey Bower is a gifted and versatile actor. Since obtaining a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, he has worked extensively in theatre, television and audiobook narration. Humphrey won the prestigious Audie Award (US) for his performance of The Family Frying Pan by Bryce Courtenay, and was shortlisted for an Audie Award for his performances of Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan and Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay. Humphrey's sensitive and intelligent readings are highly regarded and he is well-known for his capacity to perform a variety of accents.

Reviews

"Had I read Searching for Schindler before making the film, I may have made it an hour longer. I owe you so much. The world owes you more."
*Steven Spielberg*

"Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book. This memoir, listed as his 38th publication, is no exception."
*Sydney Morning Herald*

"SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER is the story of author Thomas Keneally's search for the many Holocaust survivors he needed to interview while writing SCHINDLER'S ARK, the basis for the award-winning movie SCHINDLER'S LIST. On its face, the book sounds self-serving, but the listener quickly discovers that it’s a journey of self-exploration and inspiration. In many ways this is the story of how Schindler transformed Keneally. Narrator Humphrey Bower captures the joy, curiosity, and passion that overwhelmed Keneally as he discovered Oskar Schindler and the many people on his "list". This is a story about personalities, and Bower succeeds by imbuing each with a life. It all began innocuously when Keneally met Leopold Pfefferberg Page and learned how one man changed so many others' lives, and unwittingly changed his own."
*AudioFile Magazine*

"This is Thomas Keneally's account of writing his novel Schindler's Ark and then seeing it turned into Spielberg's film Schindler's List. The central character is "Poldek" Pfefferberg, into whose Beverly Hills shop Keneally wandered in 1980 in search of a briefcase. Discovering he was an author, Poldek told him he had this "wonderful story" that he had to tell the world. This was the tale of Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Keneally portrays the improbably extravagant Poldek with affectionate grace and closes the book with a lament for his death in 2001. Keneally is appealingly forthright about the controversies that surrounded both book and film: his financial anxieties are alleviated, he's awed to be in Hollywood, he's not convinced that film is as good as words. But he never forgets that all this is nothing to the suffering of the people featured in both film and book. That ambivalence is entirely appropriate to a story of an "improbable saviour" with ambiguous motives, told by one of those he saved."
*The Guardian*

Australian author Keneally was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize for his novel Schindler's List. How Keneally came to write that novel about Oskar Schindler's rescue of more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust is a tale that, curiously enough, began in Beverly Hills while the author was promoting his Civil War novel, Confederates. Looking for a new briefcase, he entered a luggage shop owned by the ebullient, charismatic Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, one of Schindler's survivors. Poldek gave Keneally copies of documents he had once assembled for a Schindler film that was never made. Nan Talese, then at Simon & Schuster, offered a $60,000 advance for a book, and Keneally and Poldek left on an international research expedition. That journey and the survivors they met form the compelling centerpiece of this moving memoir. With publication, the question arose as to whether Schindler's List was a novel or history, but Keneally had planned from the start to write "what Truman Capote or his publisher had called faction." The closing chapters cover the making of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation, which won seven Academy Awards. Photos. (Oct. 14) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Keneally's hunt for the man a Holocaust survivor described to him as the "all-drinking, all-screwing, all-black-marketeering Nazi Oskar Schindler--but to me he was Jesus Christ." Stuff on the film, too. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

"Had I read Searching for Schindler before making the film, I may have made it an hour longer. I owe you so much. The world owes you more." -- Steven Spielberg
"Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book. This memoir, listed as his 38th publication, is no exception." -- Sydney Morning Herald
"SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER is the story of author Thomas Keneally's search for the many Holocaust survivors he needed to interview while writing SCHINDLER'S ARK, the basis for the award-winning movie SCHINDLER'S LIST. On its face, the book sounds self-serving, but the listener quickly discovers that it's a journey of self-exploration and inspiration. In many ways this is the story of how Schindler transformed Keneally. Narrator Humphrey Bower captures the joy, curiosity, and passion that overwhelmed Keneally as he discovered Oskar Schindler and the many people on his "list". This is a story about personalities, and Bower succeeds by imbuing each with a life. It all began innocuously when Keneally met Leopold Pfefferberg Page and learned how one man changed so many others' lives, and unwittingly changed his own." -- AudioFile Magazine
"This is Thomas Keneally's account of writing his novel Schindler's Ark and then seeing it turned into Spielberg's film Schindler's List. The central character is "Poldek" Pfefferberg, into whose Beverly Hills shop Keneally wandered in 1980 in search of a briefcase. Discovering he was an author, Poldek told him he had this "wonderful story" that he had to tell the world. This was the tale of Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Keneally portrays the improbably extravagant Poldek with affectionate grace and closes the book with a lament for his death in 2001. Keneally is appealingly forthright about the controversies that surrounded both book and film: his financial anxieties are alleviated, he's awed to be in Hollywood, he's not convinced that film is as good as words. But he never forgets that all this is nothing to the suffering of the people featured in both film and book. That ambivalence is entirely appropriate to a story of an "improbable saviour" with ambiguous motives, told by one of those he saved." -- The Guardian