European History : Americans in Paris Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History | 
 | 80% Recommended by our customers.
Catalog:
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Release Date:
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $32.95
Our Price: $6.27
Used Price: $4.65
(all prices are subject to changes)
More Details
Amazon international :
| |
- ISBN13: 9781594202421
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
|
|
 Like listening to a teen aged girl tell you all her drama
This book simply has too many names and people to really make it gripping and interesting. It was like listening to a teen-aged give an account of the friend of her friend's cousin who traveled in from the friend of her friend's house from out of state.
I got so loaded down with names, that I really couldn't follow along with a simple plot or story.
I guess if you like plodding through names you might enjoy this book. I prefer a book with some kind of gripping central angle to it.
Very enlightening...
A very good book on Paris during the Nazi occupation, interesting in that it's told from the perspective of a number of Americans who remained in France during this time. Author Charles Glass clearly did a lot of research and tells various stories, not always threaded together, but always enlightening. Among the those popping in and out are Progressive Ambassador William Bullitt, Sylvia Beach (owner of the Shakespeare & Co bookstore), Ernest Hemingway, Dr. Sumner Jackson (who worked at the American hospital and helped ferry many allied troops out of France), enigmatic millionaire businessman Charles Bedaux, Clara Longworth de Chambrun, as well as myriad others. It's a thrilling read, full of suspense, adventure and a lot of intrigue. Former reporter Glass fills the book with a lot of interesting factoids about what these ex-pats faced during what was one of France's darkest periods.
Interesting but lacks context
Charles Glass has written a very interesting microcosm of how a cross-section of American expatriates survived the Nazi occupation of Paris, but it offers no great insight as to what it all means. For example, we don't really get a great insight into how they suffered compared to the typical Parisian. Their lives were filled with different levels of intrigue and suffering. Some were imprisoned and others were not but suffered in other ways.
What is lacking is any context regarding if the American's went through the ordeal in any condition better or worse than their French friends and neighbors. Glass seems to indicate that while they suffered, and in some cases died, the American's did better as a whole than the French. They were not deported, nor were they held as hostages in the event of resistance events. But he barely scratches the surface on this so it is difficult to get an accurate assessment.
All in all it's not a terrible read but I can't say that I find it very compelling. If you're a WWII die hard you may enjoy it, but it will not open any new insights into the war for you.
Ambiguities
This is an interesting and well-written book. The main insight that I got from it has to do with the ambiguities encountered by civilians caught between battling armies. The war, to them, boiled down to day-to-day existence, trying to stay alive and, at the same time, retain at least some loyalty to their principles. For example, the American Hospital in Paris treated many French wounded as the Germans approached, but did everything it could to avoid treating German occupiers. There was the man the French considered a hero and the American government considered a traitor. Which was he? People who choose to live outside their home countries have a different perspective on the world and on life. You can see it in this book.
 The Americans Who Stayed
You remember in _Casablanca_ when Rick left Paris as the Germans were coming in; he and Sam (but not Ilsa, sob!) crammed onto one of the last trains leaving Paris as the Germans were about to enter. As an American, Rick would have had a bad time in Paris, and it made sense for him to clear out. There were plenty of other Americans in Paris as the Germans came in, and not all of them left. Some helped the collaborationist Vichy government, some helped the Resistance, some were sent to concentration camps, and some managed to scrape by until the Germans were driven away. All these versions of their stories get told in _Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation_ (The Penguin Press) by Charles Glass. This is an important picture of American participation in a relatively quieter part of the big war, a book populated by Americans who were idealistic, confused, or complacent. There are villains, but there are plenty of heroes among these Americans who volunteered to stay on, mostly because they loved France and they hated the idea that Nazism should overcome their beloved Paris.
The Americans in Paris before war was declared formed the largest American community in continental Europe. It is surprising how independent some of them were allowed to be after occupation. Most were interned, but quite a few remained essentially free, having merely to check in with the police now and then. Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Company, was seen by others as courageously staying on, but dismissed any praise: "I never left Paris - hadn't the energy to flee, luckily, as nothing happened to us or the other monuments." Being interned was for her part of that "nothing," though she was freed even before liberation. The Countess said that the library could only survive if there were some accommodation with the Germans. She consented, for instance, that Jews could no longer use the library, but she and her staff were "ready and willing to carry books to those subscribers who are cut off from them..." She looked forward to the eventual freeing of France from Germany by America, but she felt that her collaborationist friends had helped France get through the worst of the occupation as easily as possible. The American Hospital functioned throughout the war offering good and often free medical treatment for wounded Americans, as well as for British and French servicemen. The hospital director always arranged that the hospital would be too full of allied troops to take on Germans. He was Sumner Jackson, and he was a real American hero. Not only was he the chief surgeon at the hospital (for a salary of $150 a month), he risked his life to help Allied soldiers and airmen escape from France. He would, for instance, take them in for treatment, then fake death certificates for them, and start them on their way back to Allied forces. His apartment served as a mail drop for couriers within the Resistance. He even allowed his fifteen-year-old son to go on an excursion to Saint-Nazaire, to get photographs of the submarine base there to be used in an upcoming attack. He, his wife, and his son were eventually caught and sent to the slave labor camps in Germany. The wife and son survived, but ironically Jackson died from Allied bombs in the last week of the war. More murky were the efforts of Charles Bedaux, an American of French birth. He was a self made millionaire, an efficiency expert with plenty of American, French, and German contacts that he drew upon for many different moneymaking schemes. His big wartime brainchild was a pipeline to carry peanut oil from West Africa over the Sahara to the Mediterranean, and he worked with the Germans on the plan, but was sent back to America and charged with treason.
These are the main stories in this extensive report about a little-appreciated part of the American war effort. There are other smaller stories, fascinating ones like that of Eugene Bullard, who had been a fighter pilot in the French Army's air corps during the First World War because he was prevented from flying in the American Lafayette Escadrille due to being black. He went on to become a boxer and drummer who married into the French aristocracy and was welcomed by his wife's family. He proved to be an asset as an intelligence agent in Paris, running a gym and a club where he could overhear conversations by German soldiers. They thought a black person wouldn't understand German. There is also the story here of how the French army, marching back into the city for liberation, was prevented by the American chain of command from allowing any of their African forces to be part of that scene. There are other villainies, major and minor, in Glass's detailed and fascinating book, but since the good guys won, this is a story mostly of victory, and therefore of heroism, whether overtly fighting against the Nazi menace or simply enduring until it passed.
|
|
|
