Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is a personal family history of the Trapp Family Singers. It begins with Maria's days in the convent, traces the migrations of the family during the War years, and finishes in their family home in Vermont. Ever since seeing The Sound of Music for the first time, I have always been curious about what happened next- -did the entire family manage to safely climb the Alps to freedom? How did they pay for their journey to the US? And what connection do they have to the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont? Maria Trapp answers all of these questions in this book. While the musical version of their life did convey many of the main episodes, the storyline of the musical compressed these episodes so that they seemed to happen one after the other: Maria leaves the convent, teaches the children how to sing, marries their father, and they flee the country at the outbreak of the war, all within 2 hours. Phew! Like the musical, this book also starts with Maria's last day in the convent, but more than a year passed before she and the Baron were married, in 1927. They were married some 12 years and had 2 additional children along the way before leaving Austria. Yes, as unknowns, the family did win a song festival, but that was in 1936, and by the time they fled Austria, they were already quite well-known and had toured Europe as a family singing group. Indeed, one additional reason for leaving the country when they did was that they had been invited to sing at Hitler's birthday. When driving past the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, I have always thought of it as a ritzy place, and assumed that the money to purchase it and develop it had come from the Baron's family fortune. In reading this book, I found that that was not the case at all. The Baron's fortune was lost before the family left Austria, and they arrived in the US on borrowed money. In their new American lives, they had to restart from the very bottom of the social ladder, digging themselves out of debt before they could even begin to think of buying new clothes or a home. For years they dressed in the same simple clothes they had arrived in, and they built their first house in Vermont from the foundation up with their bare hands. That is, the girls did, since the two boys had been drafted into the US army and were fighting in Europe at the time. This book relates all of these details and many more, with a considerable sprinkling of humor. Maria comes across as a determined optimist, a young girl barely out of her teens who arrived on the doorstep of a house filled with grief and dissension. Through her personal character and upbringing, she created a family with strong bonds to each other that was able to withstand remarriage, loss of fortune, becoming refugees, and establishing a home and a livelihood in a distant foreign land. The two elements that were her constant guidance and source of inspiration were her faith and the music. This book is peppered with remarks that ring true even today: "The family that sings together, plays together, prays together, and usually stays together." "Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands- -they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied." The Sound of Music is a great story, but the story presented in this book is much better.