Praise for ‘Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure’ and ‘1941: The Year that Keeps Returning’

We are thrilled to receive praise from The New Yorker for Artemis Cooper’s Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure and from The Guardianfor Slavko Goldstein’s 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning.

Richard J. Evans writes in The Guardian:

“…[Goldstein’s] book does not focus solely on the sufferings of the victims, or treat their persecutors, torturers and murderers as anonymous, faceless or inhuman….In one personal history after another, the murderers appear as human beings, and in many cases as morally ambivalent rather than one-dimensionally evil. The police chief who helped Goldstein escape was also responsible for sending many to their death at the horrific concentration camp in Jasenovac – and was far from exceptional in this regard. It is this book’s achievement to give genocide a human face.”

In the January 27 issue of The New Yorker:

“Cooper’s biography is affectionate but not uncritical, and she ably meets the challenge of adding further intrigue to journeys and adventures, such as his kidnapping of a Nazi general on the island of Crete in 1944, that her subject has already recounted so well. Elusive and often coy, the Fermor who emerges from these pages seems so authentic that when he dies, at ninety-six, the reader feels the loss keenly.”

NYRB Classics is the US publisher of books written by Patrick Leigh Fermor, including A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the volumes that tell of his journey by foot across 1930s Europe. The final volume of the trilogy, The Broken Road, will be published in March 2014.

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