The One Man

Starred review from May 30, 2016
Bestseller Gross (Everything to Lose) revisits the horrors of Auschwitz in this harrowing, thematically rich thriller, which marks a significant departure from his previous contemporary suspense novels. In the spring of 1944, both the Germans and the Allies are pressing toward the transmutation of uranium into atomic weaponry that could win WWII. Gross postulates that the U.S. Manhattan Project, headed by Robert Oppenheimer and joined by renowned refugee physicists like Denmark’s Niels Bohr, lacked one vital component—but the Nazis have incarcerated the world expert in that area, Dr. Alfred Mendl, in Auschwitz. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, backs a near-suicidal plan to send a desk-bound Jewish intelligence officer, Nathan Blum, who escaped from Nazi-overrun Poland, into Auschwitz to rescue Mendl. Alternating between scenes of American hope-against-hope optimism and Nazi brutality, Blum’s deadly odyssey into and out of this 20th-century hell drives toward a compelling celebration of the human will to survive, remember, and overcome. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

Starred review from October 31, 2016
Early on in Gross’s riveting WWII thriller, Nathan Blum attends a meeting with OSS spymaster William “Wild Bill” Donovan and his aide, Peter Strauss, in Washington, D.C. Donovan and Strauss hope to convince Blum to undertake a suicide mission: to break into Auschwitz as an inmate, locate Dr. Alfred Mendl, an imprisoned scientist crucial to a project that could win the war, and break him out. Actor Ballerini turns the scene into a fascinating radio drama, with the gruff but charismatic Donovan greeting the bewildered, shy Yiddish-accented Blum with avuncular friendship. Ballerini finds voices for an assortment of Nazis at Auschwitz, displaying varying degrees of snarling sadism. His Mendl is mildly doddering but proud. The physicist’s protégé, Leo, a brilliant chess master gifted with total recall, has several scenes sharing a chess board and a sweetly innocent flirtation with the sympathetic beautiful blonde wife of the sociopathic commandant. These conversational moments, delicately crafted by Gross and splendidly performed by Ballerini, have a profound effect on the novel’s equally well-enacted, action-filled, breathless escape sequence. A Minotaur hardcover.