Word: korda
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FICTION: The Collected Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer ∙ Family Trade, James Carroll ∙ Forsaking All Others, Jimmy Breslin ∙ The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, Peter Benchley ∙ The South Florida Book of the Dead, Robert Merkin ∙ Worldly Goods, Michael Korda...
Worldly Goods, Michael Korda...
...surprise to find Hitler making a guest appearance in Korda's first novel, a tale of success, power, male chauvinism, Hungarians and even a little American publishing. His Fhürer unexpectedly drops in for lunch at Hermann Goring's, expounds the virtues of vegetarianism and overcomes the Reich Marshal and his companions with a blitzkrieg of uncontrolled flatulence...
This is a touch of Mel Brooks rather than Ernst Lubitsch, though elsewhere Korda exhibits a considerable talent for imitating the sophisticated innuendoes of that German-born film maker. Worldly Goods is, in fact, a trove of mimicked styles. Beyond its undeniable entertainment qualities, the book can be read as a clinic on what publishers call a page-turner. The author-editor goes one step further and ensures subliminal product identification, with his name centered at the top of every other page...
...Korda's hero commands respect, if not affection. He is a cunning, low-profile zillionaire named Paul Foster, who, as Paul Grünwald, member of one of prewar Hungary's richest families, survived the Holocaust. Grünwalds were not supposed to go to slave-labor camps. The family's Jewish bloodlines had been thinned by generations of intermarriage and Roman Catholic conversion. As leading bankers and industrialists, they had powerful friends, including Göring, through whom they sold uranium ore for Hitler's atomic-bomb research. But in the end the family...