France Memoir

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of the First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centered on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas’s fateful decision to fight in the war. The book evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature: a generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Rupert Brooke.

By his 18th birthday David Millar was living and racing in France, sleeping in rented rooms, tipped to be the next English-speaking Tour winner. A year later he'd realised the dream and signed a professional contract. He perhaps lived the high life a little too enthusiastically - he broke his heel in a fall from a roof after too much drink and before long the pressure to succeed had tipped over into doping.

The bar was high after the glorious reign of the Sun King. Louis XV, his successor, had a difficult time driving the country through religious disputes, intellectual shifts and economical hardness. This eventually led to a steep economic decline, which played an important role in the reaction of the French people against the monarchy, and eventually gave way to the French Revolution.

In this haunting memoir that reflects on the Holocaust and its legacy, award-winning author Sandell Morse discovers stories of bravery and resistance enacted during WWII in Southern France. In the course of six years at a writing residency in France, during which she met with survivors and historians, she painstakingly pieces together the puzzle that had been beguiling her over the years: What was the real story of the French Jews under the Vichy government during The Second World War?

Have you ever dreamed of quitting your job, traveling the world, and falling in love in a foreign land? Narrated by the author, Black Gypsy is the true story of Shawna Sharee, a 30-something inner-city black girl that did just that...After quitting her entire life following an ultimate betrayal, she makes her way traveling across three continents and six countries spanning seven months. This sometimes funny, sometimes spiritual, sometimes gritty, but always inspiring memoir is an urban fairytale and worldwide adventure filled with real life characters around every corner.

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out “of love for my parents and for my people.”

In June 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America’s finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him “le plus parisien des Américains”—the most Parisian American.

Saint Louis: A King's Obsession with Relics, Magic, and Spells is a richly detailed exploration of the life and reign of King Louis IX of France, a monarch whose legacy is steeped in both sanctity and the supernatural. This book delves into the hidden aspects of Louis IX’s life, revealing a ruler driven not only by his devout Christian faith but also by an insatiable hunger for mystical knowledge. King Louis IX, canonized as Saint Louis after his death, is often remembered for his piety.

In many ways it is fitting that Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) is one of the best known figures of the French Revolution, if not its most famous. The early years of the Revolution were fueled by Enlightenment ideals, seeking the social overthrow of the caste system that gave the royalty and aristocracy decisive advantages over the lower classes.

Popular biographer Carolly Erickson creates intimate and richly detailed portraits of her historical subjects. In this book she offers a provocative new perspective on Josephine and her fabled marriage to Napoleon.

Would you leave your job, sell your house, abandon your family and friends, and move to France to live on a boat? With no income, and no idea what the next day would bring? Probably not. But that's what Mike and Liz did, choosing to cast off from corporate life to live on and travel the waterways of France.

The best-selling revisionist biography of one of the great women of the 16th century. Orphaned in infancy, Catherine de Medici was the sole legitimate heiress to the Medici family fortune. Married at 14 to the future Henri II of France, she was constantly humiliated by his influential mistress, Diane de Poitiers. When her husband died as a result of a duelling accident in Paris, Catherine was made queen regent during the short reign of her eldest son (married to Mary Queen of Scots, and like many of her children he died young).

Bursting with humorous stories about local characters and vivid description of French landscapes and customs gleaned from thirty-five years in the country, Raising Olives in Provence tells the story of how the author improbably came to renovate a run-down house and raise olive trees in the hills above Saint-Tropez.

One of the towering figures of the age was Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose works were essential to the ideological developments of the 18th century. The prestige of French literature in the 18th century resides especially in its revolutionary character; while the writers of the previous century used to support the social order through their works and showed sympathy and even attempted to explain the political order of the time.

Gilbert Michlin's sober text thoroughly documents the story of a Jewish immigrant family in France during the war years. Known as the country of enlightenment and human rights, France drew many Jews from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, including Michlin's parents, who fled the harsh conditions of Poland in the mid-1920s. Michlin's memoir evokes the golden years of his family's life in prewar Paris, where he was born, but also reflects on the difficulties of being Jewish in France.

Le monde regorge de tacticiens... et manque de stratèges ! Pourtant, les dirigeants qui réussissent le mieux, quel que soit leur domaine - diplomatie, politique, conseil, entreprise, défense -, sont ceux qui savent élaborer une stratégie, la faire partager à leurs collaborateurs et s'y tenir. Persévérer dans sa vision, s'adapter, agir sous contrainte sans compromettre sa liberté : ce sont autant de défis à relever pour viser le sommet, y compris dans sa propre vie.

Between 1796 and 1815, the continent of Europe was held in thrall by one of the most remarkable personalities of modern times, a man whose name was on the lips of every man, woman, and child: Napoleon Bonaparte. Certainly, one would have to go back to the time of Charlemagne to find his equal on the field of battle, in the halls of diplomacy, or in the courts of jurisprudence.

Throughout history, a countless number of historical figures have had their lives overshadowed by the myths and legends that surround them to the extent that their legacy comes to define them. In French history, this is truer of Marie Antoinette than just about everyone else. Nearly 220 years after she was put to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette is more famous than ever, fairly or unfairly coming to epitomize royalty and everything that was wrong with it.

Zinédine Zidane est le Français le plus célèbre au monde, mais qui est-il vraiment ? Un être secret qui cultive la discrétion, un homme adulé qui se préserve et protège les siens, une star au destin exceptionnel qui reste un type normal. A travers dix-huit années d'échanges et de confessions exclusives avec le joueur devenu entraîneur.

La nuit, chacun la voit, la vit, la sent, l'apprivoise à sa manière. De celle de Guyane, trouée d'un faible lampadaire sous la lueur duquel, enfant, à la faveur de la moiteur et du silence, elle allait lire en cachette, à celle qui lui permettait de régler ses comptes avec les péchés capitaux que les religieuses lui faisaient réciter dans la journée, la nuit a souvent été, pour Christiane Taubira, une complice, une alliée, une sorte de sœur intime, un moment particulier.