The Orpheus Clock
The Search for My Family's Art Treasures Stolen by the Nazis
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Narrated by:
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Derek Perkins
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By:
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Simon Goodman
About this listen
Simon Goodman's grandparents came from German-Jewish banking dynasties and perished in concentration camps. His father rarely spoke of their family history or heritage. But, when he passed away and Simon received his father's old papers, a story began to emerge. The Gutmanns, as they were known then, rose from a small Bohemian hamlet to become one of Germany's most powerful banking families. They also amassed a magnificent, world-class art collection that included works by Degas, Renoir, Botticelli, Guardi, and many, many others. But the Nazi regime snatched from them everything they had worked to build: their remarkable art, their immense wealth, their prominent social standing, and their very lives. With the help of his family, Simon initiated the first Nazi looting case to be settled in the United States.
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VERY INFORMATIVE
- By Terry on 03-26-12
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Hitler's Forgotten Children
- A True Story of the Lebensborn Program and One Woman's Search for Her Real Identity
- By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, Tim Tate
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Hitler’s Forgotten Children is both a harrowing personal memoir and a devastating investigation into the awful crimes and monstrous scope of the Lebensborn program in World War 2. Created by Heinrich Himmler, the Lebensborn program abducted as many as half a million children from across Europe. Through a process called Germanization, they were to become the next generation of the Aryan master race in the second phase of the Final Solution.
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Interesting story.
- By Brad Bowles on 04-08-16
By: Ingrid von Oelhafen, and others
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Paper Love
- Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
- By: Sarah Wildman
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Years after her grandfather's death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled "Correspondence: Patients A-G". What she found inside weren't dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family's prewar Vienna. One woman's letters stood out: those from Valy-Valerie Scheftel, her grandfather's lover who remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed Austria.
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Compelling and Personal Exploration
- By Murphee on 08-09-23
By: Sarah Wildman
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The Arms of Krupp
- 1587-1968
- By: William Manchester
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 48 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The Arms of Krupp brings to life Europe's wealthiest, most powerful family, a 400-year German dynasty that developed the world's most technologically advanced weapons, from cannons to submarines to antiaircraft guns; provided arms to generations of German leaders, including the Kaiser and Hitler; operated private concentration camps during the Nazi era; survived conviction at Nuremberg; and wielded enormous influence on the course of world events.
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BIG CHUNK MISSING
- By Ian on 06-12-17
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Picasso's War
- How Modern Art Came to America
- By: Hugh Eakin
- Narrated by: Mack Sanderson
- Length: 15 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 1939, Pablo Picasso was renowned in Europe but disdained by many in the United States. One year later, Americans across the country were clamoring to see his art. How did the controversial leader of the Paris avant-garde break through to the heart of American culture? The answer begins a generation earlier, when a renegade Irish American lawyer named John Quinn set out to build the greatest collection of Picassos in existence. His dream of a museum to house them died with him, until it was rediscovered by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
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Better Books on Picasso Available
- By john burke on 08-17-22
By: Hugh Eakin
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Nazi Billionaires
- The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties
- By: David de Jong
- Narrated by: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.
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Good but flawed
- By I. M. Rightwriter on 07-11-23
By: David de Jong
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After the Romanovs
- Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War
- By: Helen Rappaport
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland.
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Mildly interesting story of Russians exiles
- By Conrad Hastler on 05-20-22
By: Helen Rappaport
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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The Map Thief
- The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps
- By: Michael Blanding
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers - both as beautiful works of art and as practical tools to navigate the world. But to those who collect them, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and sometimes disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects.
Once considered a respectable antiquarian map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley spent years doubling as a map thief - until he was finally arrested slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library.
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A Study of the Strangeness of People
- By Carole T. on 12-10-14
By: Michael Blanding
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Hitler's Children
- Sons and Daughters of Third Reich Leaders
- By: Gerald Posner
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Göring. Hess. Mengele. Dönitz. Names that conjure up dark memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. They were the architects of the Third Reich. And they were fathers. Gerald Posner convinced 11 sons and daughters of Hitler's inner circle to break their silence. This second generation of perpetrators in Hitler's Children struggle with their Third Reich inheritance. In grappling with memories of good and loving fathers who were later charged with war crimes, these heirs to the Nazi legacy add a fresh and important perspective.
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Couldn’t put it down!
- By Art Guzman on 02-11-18
By: Gerald Posner
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The Eternal Nazi
- From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim
- By: Nicholas Kulish, Souad Mekhennet
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.
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Not certain about this one...
- By Nancy on 11-24-22
By: Nicholas Kulish, and others
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When Paris Sizzled
- The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Annees folles, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of war to find that a new world greeted them - one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior.
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Informative, but no sizzle
- By OzEnigma on 06-01-17
By: Mary McAuliffe
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Empty Mansions
- The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
- By: Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades.
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Fascinating, But Know This...
- By Karen K on 04-08-15
By: Bill Dedman, and others
What listeners say about The Orpheus Clock
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- fc albano
- 02-22-23
Detailed and engaging
Well written and exceptionally narrated. This story takes a systematic approach to dissecting these ancient, deliberately covered up, and tangled plots to crimes of looting before, during and after WWII.
Well written, engaging, relevant, it illuminates the contemporary reverberations of Nazism, and how together with a cast of professions e.g. curators, governments, philanthropists, have helped and often hindered the reclamation process. Very enlightening.
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- Antonoso
- 03-25-18
Undoubtedly winding whereabouts of art
Passionate driven tale of a astonishing art collects and his whereabouts to recover.
An history of three centuries of a family heirloom truncated by the fateful events of the first half of XX century how it links the generation to fulfill a void, beautiful related and powerful engaging, I love it !
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1 person found this helpful
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- Zia
- 08-24-19
Heartwrenchingly Triumphant
An immersive story of loss, terror, unspeakable cruelty, and unforgivable greed and injustice in its aftermath; but at the same time a story of beauty, faith, hopr, love, fabulous art, the power of persistence and through it all, the bond of roots and family history. Bravo, Mr. Goodman...your ancestors are indeed smiling on you!
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- Daniel Grünfeld
- 09-18-19
A Masterpiece of 21st Century History
I first read The Orpheus Clock shortly after reading The Hare With Amber Eyes and recently re-read both. Although both are extraordinary and essential works of art and research in their own right, they are also major literary accomplishments in what has almost become a modern literary genre, the personal documentation of evidence of family trauma, history and discovery. This genre is not for the faint of heart, neither in the reader nor the writer. The volume and meticulousness of the research and the evidentiary standards, the cross referencing, the profundity of the psychological insights, the integrity of the first person narrative, are formidable.
The exquisite prose of Simon Goodman's painstakingly detailed narrative of his personal and historic journey to uncover one of the greatest scandals of the twentieth and twenty-first century is always thorough, dramatic, colourful and rich and never dull. It resonates with the warmth of the characters, the luxury and grandiosity of the wealth and art works of its subjects. As the events unfold, Goodman bears witness to the unparalleled brutality, systemic corruption and criminality that continued not only unpunished but most profitably, for the perpetrators, at the highest levels of the art world, in the justice systems and the halls of government, commerce and high finance, decades after the Holocaust and the end of the second world war. This is a book that should be required reading in every advanced history and art history class in Europe and the Americas.
I very much enjoyed Derek Perkins’s recording of The Orpheus Clock. Obviously, the reading and interpretation were immaculate. But I am also especially grateful for his pronunciation of Dutch, French, German, Italian and other non-English names, words and expressions, which was consistently precise and, as far as I know, correct. This is a refreshing change from the majority of English and American recordings. It is very distracting to hear such recordings routinely screw up anything that is not commonplace in the English language. It would have ruined any recording of The Orpheus Clock, in particular, because so much of the book involves details of international travel and research. So, I commend Derek Perkins’s work, at the highest level.
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2 people found this helpful
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- A. Baron
- 02-23-20
Read it!
Fabulous book from start to finish. You’ll find yourself hoping for another book from this writer. Fantastic narration and command of French and German pronunciations.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ray Stewart
- 01-30-24
More Than Just the Orpheus Clock
Simon Goodman's grandparents lost all that they had, including their lives, to the Nazis during WWII. Simon's father spent part of his life looking for those lost items which included many paintings, jewelry, antique china, silver, and furniture. After his death, Simon and his brother took on this daunting task to find the lost treasures. Neither Dutch officials nor the auction house, Sotheby, came across as very helpful during their pursuit. The narrator did a fantastic job with the many foreign words.
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