The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/449750 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Kindness of Strangers Author: Salka Viertel Narrator: Christina Delaine Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 16 hours 36 minutes Release date: November 17, 2020 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: A memoir about showbiz in the early twentieth century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age. Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, 'a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood . . . is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka's house on Mabery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.'