Michael Korda-Muse of Fire
he Poets of WW I
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With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation--destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England--and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives. In a sweeping narrative that echoes The Guns of August, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it.
Podcast with Michael Korda
I was born before the Second World War–I was six when it began in September 1939–but I have lived all my life in the shadow of the First.
The First World War erupted suddenly, like a summer storm out of a clear blue sky, catching perhaps its most famous poet, and most of his friends and companions, as well at the great powers of Europe as well as the great powers of Europe, by surprise.–Michael Korda
Charmed Lives
A Rolls Royce Silver Cloud drove him to airports; the British film industry kowtowed to his power; the great Hollywood studios fawned at his feet.Sir Alexander Korda, one of the world's most flamboyant movie tycoons, rose from obscurity in rural Hungary to become a legendary filmmaker. With him were his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, all living charmed lives in circles that included H. G. Wells, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Marlena Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, and Merle Oberon, who was soon to be Alex's wife. But along with Alex's flair for success was an equally powerful impulse for destruction. Now, Vincent's son, Michael Korda, in the first book of his memoirs, recalls the enchanted
figures of his childhood...the glory days of the Korda brothers' great films...and then their heartbreaking, tragic end.
THE GREAT WAR
This monumental, dramatic photographic narrative captures the war from the early arms race that developed around the massing of prewar battleship fleets to the final moments of the conflict with the sinking of the German fleet in Scapa. The photographs span the many battlefronts throughout the world: from the British Isles to the south Atlantic, across Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Sudan and East Africa, Jerusalem and Damascus. Here are soldiers from across the globe, vast battleships, dirigibles overhead, the streets of London, the first battle of Ypres, German submarines at sea, the beaches of Gallipoli, the battle of Jutland, the battle of the Somme trenches, and much, much more.
The Tragedy of the Great War
Peter Jackson's powerful documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of the end of the war.
Paris Readers Circle winners
Sylvia Safer, NYC
Ann Winfield, LA
Linda Feldman, SF
Jane Gabin, Chapel Hill, NC
Anne Meyer, Hastings on the Hudson, NY
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