Americans in Paris : life and death under Nazi occupation

by Charles Glass

Hardcover, 2010

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Penguin Press, 2010.

Description

Acclaimed journalist Glass looks to the American expatriate experience of Nazi-occupied Paris to reveal a fascinating forgotten history of the greatest generation. A moving and deeply thought-provoking book.--"Sunday Telegraph."

User reviews

LibraryThing member TomVeal
The title is imprecise: The geographical scope is wider than Paris, and the featured Americans had stronger ties to France than to the U.S. That is why they stayed there after the French army's collapse and the division of the country between a German-occupied zone and the territory of the
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collaborationist Vichy regime. Leaving would have entailed the sacrifice of extensive business interests or close personal friendships or humanitarian enterprises.

Americans in Paris follows the fortunes of about half a dozen of these Franco-Americans. They are not a representative sample. Except for a few who show up only in vignettes, all have been the subjects of other books. They include industrialist and efficiency expert Charles Bedaux, the aristocratic de Chambrun family (père an American citizen in his own mind, mère and fils in reality), Dr. Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Paris, and Sylvia Beach, proprietress of the original Shakespeare and Company, Paris's leading English language bookstore. I suspect that octogenarian Charles Anderson, a minor business functionary married to a French woman, is more typical. He gets only a passage near the end of the book, and that passage aims to score points against American racism rather than illuminate the experience of living in wartime Paris.

The advantage of the atypical main characters is that they have fascinating, and very different, stories. On one side is Dr. Jackson, who used his hospital position to help downed Allied airmen escape from the Germans. More ambivalent are the Chambruns, who worked to keep the American Hospital and American Library out of Nazi hands but showed no sympathy for the Resistance and were on good terms with Pierre Laval, whose daughter Chambrun fils had married. M. Bedaux alternately fought with and sought to profit from both Vichy and Berlin. At the end of his life, he was facing treason charges in the United States; the post-war French government awarded him a posthumous knighthood of the Legion of Honor. Sylvia Beach, fiercely anti-Nazi but intent on keeping her bookstore running, kept her head down.

Because the author's sources are, for the most part, his subjects themselves or their family and friends, all look at least a little bit heroic. Because all but Miss Beach were comparatively affluent, their sufferings were doubtless less than those of a Charles Anderson. There is room for a more comprehensive study of expatriate Americans' "life and death under Nazi occupation". This one, nevertheless, fills part of the niche quite admirably.
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LibraryThing member andalusiac
Amazing that the author could make such an interesting episode in history so BORING. He only followsa handful of people whos memoirs he was able to check out of the library. Unfortunately, not much happened to them during the occupation. No stories of dramatic resistance, nothing at all about the
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Jews of Paris, and very little about what the city was actually like under occupation.

Tres disappointing!
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LibraryThing member ElenaDanielson
Interesting topic, I wanted to find out more about Rene de Chambrun, ok treatment, but disjointed and limited. I wish the author had used more multilingual research assistants to scour sources, and had a talented editor to rearrange sections for coherence, and then had time to pull the threads
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together about the significance of expat Paris for Americans and French....
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LibraryThing member sageness
I enjoyed the hell out of this. Beautifully researched. Parts of it brought me to tears because OMG what horrible things were done by human beings to other human beings. Other parts were just made of awesome. STRONG female component: lots of awesome women, several of whom were queer. Note that this
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is exactly what it says on the tin. The stories are of people holding American passports who stayed in Paris during the German occupation and what happened to them after the US declared war on Germany. A fair bit of suspense but no gratuitous horror or gore, although keep in mind that this is a book about one of the most horrific periods in recent history, so a certain amount of horribleness is inevitable. Quite a lot of the book focuses on Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore.
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LibraryThing member Sarah_Gruwell
I found this book a mixed bag of good and not-so-good. There was a lot of information presented that was new to me. I found myself engrossed into the lives of Americans in Nazi-Occupied France and in all the varying degrees of their collaboration, help to the Resistance, or just trying to survive
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intact. It's very evident that the author put a lot of time into research and into writing a valid non-fictional, scholarly book. He was also able to balance it out with an enjoyable reading style that brought the characters alive and made them relevant to the reader.

However, it seemed like the author was trying too hard at times to be scholarly and included information into the narrative that sometimes didn't seem to need to be there. Intricate details about place names and life histories of very minor individuals in the narrative bogged down the reading considerably. There was also a focus on certain individuals to the detriment of other storylines. The balance between the different stories the author was trying to tell was very skewed. I'll admit that I skimmed some sections of the narrative that dealt with character owning too big a presence in the book.

When it comes down to it, this is a fairly good book on this subject, one of the few I know of. It is definitely well researched and reads, for the most part, smoothly. There are some pacing issues and instances where the author puts way too much information into the book. Yet, I found myself enjoying the reading experience and learning something too.
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LibraryThing member busterrll
Valuable insights on life in occupied Paris during Word war II.
Huge, immense cast of characters makes for some difficult reading at times, but well worth the effort
As is often the case, those who are the real heroes are those you might have heard of.
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
5631. Americans in Paris Life and Death under Nazi Occupation, by Charles Glass (read 7 Jun 2019) This book, first published in 2009, kind of jerkkily tells of some Americans who stayed in Paris after the Nazis took over France in June 1940. The lives of persons connected with the American Library
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and the famed book shop Shakespeare and Co. and with the American Hospital are followed through the trials and tribulations they endured while the Nazis were in control of France. Some of the account is of much interest but there are also things related which seemed of less significance at least to me. Some of the things the Ameicans endured were difficult but of course they pale into insignificance compared to what French Jews and persons actively seeking to resist the Nazis underwent. One rejoices when the invasion of the continent finally occurs and the account of the liberation of Paris is good to read. A relative of FDR's was a son-in-law of Pierre Laval, so there is quite a bit about Laval and his behavior, though the fact he was tried and executed after France was liberated is not dwelt on.
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LibraryThing member PattyLee
Very well written, well researched story of various Americans, usually famous or rich or titled who stay or are trapped in Paris during the Nazi occupation. There are many tales of treachery and danger in this absorbing story. Perhaps among the most shocking sideline is the treatment of black
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Americans by the U.S. military, from refusing to let them serve in integrated units to banning them from participating in General LeClerc’s triumphant liberation march ito Paris, even though they had been serving in integrated Free French units,
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LibraryThing member kslade
Informative book about Americans who stayed in Paris during the occupation by the Germans in WW2.

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