A 2016 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Finalist National Book Award winner M.
Anderson..
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Symphony for the City of the Dead is a masterwork thrillingly told and impeccably researched by National Book Award-winning author M.
It is also a look at the power--and layered meaning--of music in beleaguered lives.
This is the true story of a City under siege: the triumph of bravery and defiance in the face of terrifying odds.
Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a Symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens--the Leningrad Symphony, which came to occupy a surprising place of prominence in the eventual Allied victory.
Residents burned books, furniture, and floorboards to keep warm; they ate family pets and--eventually--one another to stay alive.
Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, their relatives having neither the means nor the strength to bury them.
More than a million citizens perished.
In September 1941, Adolf Hitler\'s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history--almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943-1944.
Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the Siege of Leningrad and the role played by Russian composer Shostakovich and his Leningrad Symphony.
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A 2016 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Finalist National Book Award winner M
