Suggested Reading List
Suite Francais
Author: Irene Nemirovsky
Description: Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940. Suite Franaise tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. As Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs, even as their world begins to fall apart. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemyin their town, their homes, even in their hearts.When Irne Nmirovsky began working on Suite Franaise, she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she died. For sixty-four years, this novel remained hidden and unknown.
Sarah's Key
Author: Tatiana de Rosnay
Description: A young girl. A fateful key. A woman searching for the truth Experience the novel that has touched millions.
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door to door arresting Jewish families in the middle of the night. Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboardtheir secret hiding placeand promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.
Sixty Years Later: Sarahs story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. In her research, Julia stumbles onto a trail of secrets that link her to Sarah, and to questions about her own future.
With more than five million copies in print and over two years on the New York Times bestseller list, Sarahs Key has made its way into the hearts and minds of readers everywhere. Now, with this beautiful new hardcover edition, the gift of powerful storytelling can be shared with the ones you love.
Paris Underground
Author: Etta Shiber
Description: Contents include: I Escape from Europe i II Flight from Paris 13 III The English Pilot 22 IV Running the Gauntlet 31 V They Are Here 37 VI Plans for Escape 51 VII William Escapes 57 VIII A Trip to Doullens 67 IX Ten Thousand Englishmen 80 X The Gestapo Pounces 86 XI Where Is Lieutenant Burke 93 XII Nach Paris 103 XIII The Wound no XIV Friends or Enemies 17 XV A Visit to Father Christian 129 XVI The Death Decree 139 fcvn An Old Friend 14 XVIII Check to the Gestapo 160 Made in Heaven 174 f wo Scares CONTENTS CHAPTER. XXIII First Day in Prison XXIV The Stool Pigeon XXV Release XXVI Where Is Kitty XXVII Travels with a Shadow XXVIII Prison Again XXIX Kitty XXX The Trial XXXI Captain Weber Speaks XXXII The Sentence XXXIII Cut Rate for Freedom XXXIV Micheline XXXV A New Cell-Mate XXXVI Louise Clears Up a Mystery XXXVII A New Prison XXXVIII Prison at Troyes XXXIX Pearl Harbor. Axis Report XL A New Arrival XLI Spring XLII Parole XLIII Father Christian XLI
The Paris Wife
Author: Paula McLain
Description: Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happinessuntil she meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile groupthe fabled Lost Generationthat includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris. As Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history and pours himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises, Hadley strives to hold on to her sense of self as her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Eventually they find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriagea deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything theyve fought so hard for.
A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
A Moveable Feast
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Description: Published posthumously in 1964,A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingways most beloved works. Since Hemingways personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this spe- cial restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author intended it to be published.
Featuring a personal Foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernests sole surviving son, and an Introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this new edi- tion also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-pub- lished Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of other literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingways own early experiments with his craft.
Sure to excite critics and readers alike, the restored edition of A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
Author: Cornelia Otis Skinner
Description: OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY is a travel essay that appeared in 1942. Within, co-authors and best pals Cornelia Otis Skinner from Bryn Mawr, PA and Emily Kimbrough from Indiana share the experiences of an independent trip to Europe made in 1920 when young, footloose and relatively free of parental oversight. Skinner's parents were traveling on a parallel but more or less separate itinerary.
The charm of this delightful narrative lies in the fact that it's a recollection of girlish innocence, naivete, and silliness told from the perspective of a more mature adulthood that achieves an engaging, self-deprecating wit. Had the two travelers been teenage boys, I doubt that such a retrospective tale would've been conceived and told by their grown-up counterparts; it's just not a Guy Thing.
From Montreal to London to Paris, our heroines' misadventures are myriad. Their passenger ship runs aground in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Cornelia contracts measles in the mid-Atlantic and must be virtually smuggled ashore on reaching England. The two get lost in the maze at Hampton Court. Misdirected to recommended lodgings in Rouen, they spend the night on the top floor of a brothel, to the bemusement of the house madam, and never have a clue. (Teenage boys would've noticed, you think?) At the Rouen railroad station, Emily's overstuffed purse looses its contents onto the tracks just as a train pulls in. Bedbugs attack Skinner in the City of Light. Lunch at the Paris Ritz proves mortifying. A treacherous hair net ("Venida double-mesh") manifests itself during Cornelia's introductory acting lesson with a French stage idol.
The Monuments Men: Allied Heores, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Author: Robert M. Edsel & Bret Witter
Description: At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.
Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Originas of the Modern Museum in 18th Century Paris
Author: Andrew McClellan
Description: Founded in the final years of the Enlightenment, the Louvre--with the greatest collection of Old Master paintings and antique sculpture assembled under one roof--became the model for all state art museums subsequently established. Andrew McClellan chronicles the formation of this great museum from its origins in the French royal picture collections to its apotheosis during the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. More than a narrative history, McClellan's account explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogic aims, and aesthetic criteria of the Louvre. Drawing on new archival materials, McClellan also illuminates the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Paris From the Ground Up
Author: James McGregor
Description: Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernista Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light.
His panorama begins with an ancient Gallic fortress on the Seine, burned to the ground by its own defenders in a vain effort to starve out Caesars legions. After ninth-century raids by the Vikings ended, Parisians expanded the walls of their tiny sanctuary on the Ile de la Cit, turning the rivers right bank into a thriving commercial district and the Rive Gauche into a college town. Gothic spires expressed a taste for architectural novelty, matched only by the palaces and pleasure gardens of successive monarchs whose ingenuity made Paris the epitome of everything French. The fires of Revolution threatened all that had come before, but Baron Haussmann saw opportunity in the wreckage. No planned city in the world is more famous than his.
Paris from the Ground Up allows readers to trace the citys evolution in its architecture and artfrom the Roman arena to the Muse dOrsay, from the Louvres defensive foundations to I. M. Peis transparent pyramids. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.
The Greater Journey - Americans in Paris
Author: David McCullough
Description: As David McCullough writes, Not all pioneers went west.
In The Greater Journey, he tells the enthralling, inspiringand until now, untoldstory of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, hungry to learn and to excel in their work. What they achieved would profoundly alter American history.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid band. Another was Charles Sumner, whose encounters with black students at the Sorbonne inspired him to become the most powerful voice for abolition in the U.S. Senate. Friends James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Morse not only painting what would be his masterpiece, but also bringing home his momentous idea for the telegraph. Harriet Beecher Stowe traveled to Paris to escape the controversy generated by her book, Uncle Toms Cabin. Three of the greatest American artists eversculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargentflourished in Paris, inspired by French masters.
Almost forgotten today, the heroic American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of Paris, and the nightmare of the Commune. His vivid diary account of the starvation and suffering endured by the people of Paris is published here for the first time.
Telling their stories with power and intimacy, McCullough brings us into the lives of remarkable men and women who, in Saint-Gaudens phrase, longed to soar into the blue.
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