Restless Hungarian

<i>The Restless Hungarian</i> is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism the Jewish Diaspora and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the Joy of Space. As an engineer he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers churches museums and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso Isamu Noguchi and Jean Dubuffet.<br> In his private life he was a divided man living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war mental illness and suicide. In telling his father's story the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world's deadliest weapons during the Cold War a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew a husband who was terrified of his wife's madness and a man whose personal saints were artists.