A Hero of Our Own

About the Book

"Fry was the American Schindler with desperate exiles, menacing Nazis, forged documents and midnight escapes [think] Casablanca."

Varian Fry, the only American honored at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, was a young New Yorker who rescued more than 1,500 Europeans from the Nazi's including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, and other intellectuals, political activists, and "degenerative" artists, many of them Jews. This moving Holocaust rescue story is set against the backdrop of American isolationism and anti-Semitism.

"The drama here is in the thrill of rescue, the realistic portrait of a complex leader, and the decidedly nonheroic truths about WWII at home."

"One of the BEST BOOKS of 2001"

About the Author

Sheila Isenberg is under contract to Palgrave Macmillan for Her War, a biography of American heiress and World War II heroine Muriel Gardiner. Isenberg's last book, A Hero of Our Own, a biography of Varian Fry published in 2001 by Random House, was named a notable book by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and is a featured book on the official web site of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is also the author of Women Who Love Men Who Kill (Simon & Schuster 1991); co-author with the late William M. Kunstler of My Life as a Radical Lawyer (Carol Publishing 1994); and collaborator with Tracey Brown on The Life and Times of Ron Brown, (William Morrow 1998). Isenberg's books have been translated into Japanese and German, and she appears frequently in the national media, most recently on "Good Morning America." She has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, "20/20," "The Today Show," many other cable and network programs, and dozens of newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and internationally. She is an adjunct instructor of English and Journalism at Marist College in New York's Hudson Valley.