Hamid Shams, BBP Films Producer and Cinematographer
“This is an engaging personal narrative of how Joram Piatigorsky emerged from his illustrious family to become a highly distinguished, award-winning American scientist, an art collector and recently, a writer and novelist. Piatigorsky’s journey includes his parents’ narrow escape from Hitler to the rural Adirondack Mountains where Piatigorsky was born, and then takes us from formal concert halls to his intimate childhood home to listen to the great musicians of the twentieth century, to the Rothschild palaces of his French relatives, and across the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, where he meets his Russian relatives for the first time. Most importantly, he describes in simple, readable prose how he forged the first research laboratory on the molecular biology of the eye, which became the recognized world leader in the field of vision science and eye evolution. In my opinion, Piatigorsky’s unique story will receive a wide audience: professional and lay scientists, art collectors, musicians, historians, writers and those who have struggled to find their identity.”
