By Isabel Vincent
Overture of Hope
Schindler’s List meets The Sound of Music as best-selling New York Post investigative journalist Isabel Vincent delves into pre-World-War-II history to recover the amazing story of two British spinsters who masterminded a plan to spirit dozens of Jewish stars and personnel of the German and Austrian opera to England and save them from a terrible fate under the Third Reich. Will resonate with readers of The Nazi Officer’s Wife and The Dressmakers of Auschwitz.
Best Selling Author
Isabel Vincent
Isabel Vincent is an award-winning investigative reporter for The New York Post and the author of six books, including Gilded Lily: Lily Safra, The Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows. The book is the unauthorized biography of the international philanthropist, whose fourth husband, the banker Edmond Safra, died in a mysterious fire in Monaco. Isabel spent several years researching her subject in Brazil, where the book has been banned by a local court.
She is also the author of the award-winning Bodies and Souls, which tells the story of impoverished Jewish women from the shtetls of Russia and Poland who were forced into prostitution in South America. Isabel won the National Jewish Book Award (Canada) for her work on Bodies and Souls, which has become a primer for activists fighting against sex trafficking around the world today. Her book on Swiss banks and dormant accounts in the Nazi era — Hitler’s Silent Partners — was the recipient of the Yad Vashem Award for Holocaust History. Her first book, See No Evil, goes behind the scenes in one of Latin America’s biggest kidnapping cases.
Vincent began her career in journalism as a correspondent in Rio de Janeiro, from which she covered Latin America and Africa. She once bought a house in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s biggest shantytown, and traveled through the Amazon Rainforest with Avon ladies who peddled perfume and face cream in the world’s remotest cosmetics market. She can sing “Girl from Ipanema” in Portuguese, and was the last journalist to interview bossa nova’s greatest composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Other Books
Dinner With Edward
With its delicious food, warm jazz, and stunning views of Manhattan, Edward’s home was a much-needed refuge for reporter Isabel Vincent. Her recently widowed ninety-something neighbor would prepare weekly meals for Isabel. But over long, dark evenings where they both grieved for their very different lost marriages, Isabel realised she was being offered a gift greater than good wine and perfect lamb chops.
Both moving and uplifting, Dinner with Edward raises a glass to the power of simple pleasures and the surprising connections formed in times of hardship.
Gilded Lily
The mesmerizing biography of one of the world’s richest, most intriguing women—philanthropist and socialite Lily Safra
Gilded Lily tells Lily Safra’s story for the first time. Using archival sources, court documents, and interviews with childhood friends and former employees in South America, investigative journalist Isabel Vincent chronicle’s Safra’s rise from humble origins in Brazil to fabled wealth in London, New York, and Monaco.
Bodies and Souls
In the second half of the nineteenth century, several thousand impoverished young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were forced into prostitution in the frontier colonies of Latin America, South Africa, India, and parts of the United States by the Zwi Migdal, a notorious criminal gang of Jewish mobsters.
Bodies and Souls is a shocking and spellbinding account of a monumental betrayal that brings to light a dark and shameful hitherto untold chapter in Jewish history.
Hitler’s Silent Partners
Award-winning journalist Isabel Vincent unravels the labyrinthine story behind the headlines: how desperate men and women tried to secure their families’ futures by opening bank accounts in Switzerland; how the Nazis laundered, through Swiss banks, gold seized from the treasuries of occupied countries, much of it looted from the Jews; how the demands of international business, Swiss bank secrecy, and greed have conspired to prevent the truth from being disclosed for over half a century and still prevent restitution.
See No Evil
Christine Lamont and David Spencer were two young Canadian idealists who traveled to Latin America as human rights workers. But in 1989, the pair was charged in the kidnapping of a Brazilian millionaire. Although they pled innocent, they were convicted and sentenced to 28 years in prison. Here, Vincent, who has had access to Lamont and Spencer, retraces the story to show that the couple were anything but “innocents abroad.”.