A Triumph of Shadows

A Triumph of Shadows, takes the reader all the way back to the birth of the medium. Watch nickelodeons being planned and built! See them grow from converted store spaces to movie palaces! Stand beside the earliest movie makers as they film in every location that a camera can be cranked and a tripod set up! Eavesdrop on William Dickson Thomas Armat, and the patents-crazy Edison as they enter the fray of inventors seeking credit and control of the technology behind all the wonder! Share a brunch with Marcus Loew, Carl Laemmle, and others as they argue over the best directions for the industry to take! The story has its human side as well. Follow Sam Yanoff and his family as they escape the pogroms of Russia to settle first on New York's Lower East Side, then in 1900's Harlem. Join them as they help build this flourishing new art form. A Triumph of Shadows brings to life the fierce competition, the bitter conflicts, the excitement and passion of the era when films first enchanted the world. If you love movies, read A Triumph of Shadows. You will love them even more!

Review :
Having given us a moving love story set in a haunted grind house theater in The Phantom of Skid Row, Harry Ringel now turns to the earliest days of the movies in his new novel A Triumph of Shadows. His central character is Sam Yanoff, a pioneer in the medium, alongside actual historical figures, including Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and Carl Laemmle, as well as lesser known but no less vital contributors such as W.K.L. Dickson and Thomas Armat. A Triumph of Shadows runs along the same twin tracks as the history of early cinema. The violent enforcement of Edison's patents parallels advances in the art of the movies, from the innovations and inspirations of dreamers such as Sam. Nickelodeons, with their five-cent admission prices, started to replace the music hall as the venue for movies. Meanwhile, large numbers of moviegoers lived in the most abject poverty, which Sam and his love Rose witnessed and sometimes shared. A Triumph of Shadows ends in1915, the key moment when the shadows truly triumph. Movies become epic, the drama more sophisticated, with vast casts and enormous sets. Many hundreds of theaters now fill the world. Movies themselves cross all lines of class and race. Rich in detail and character, Harry Ringel's absorbing novel uses the lens of the past to view the present: a time when movies thrive as a vital art form for millions. Joseph Kaufman, Executive Producer, Assault on Precinct 13 and Nails As one century feeds into the early decades of the next and the country's population increases with waves of immigrants, a new technology evolves finally exploding with massive changes affecting the life of the nation. While this is descriptive of America today and the preceding several decades, it also applies to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but instead of the internet and Al, the new technology is motion pictures. Such is the world Harry Ringel depicts in his most recent novel, A Triumph of Shadows, written in eloquent prose imparting the story of the development of movies and of the people who made that possible. In place of Bezos, Musk, Gates, Cook and Zuckerberg, Ringel recounts Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, William Fox and Thomas Armat, some of the progenitors of the motion picture industry of whom many were immigrants and who along with the novel's fictional protagonist, Sam Yanoff, inhabit an engrossing and informative narrative. Similar to contemporary times, within the evolution of motion pictures lies a persistent tension among the technocrats, artisans, government officials, and entrepreneurs who brought the dream of the medium to reality offering both benefits and detriments to a receptive public. By providing a portal into that period, A Triumph of Shadows might just offer sagacious guidance in managing the challenges facing us today. Richard D. Bank, author of The Tree of Sorrow, The Bus Ride and The Ship to America