France Memoir

Bronx-born top turret-gunner Arthur Meyerowitz was on his second mission when he was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as Harmful Lil Armful who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground. After fleeing the wreck, Arthur knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse, whose owners hastily took him in. Fortunately, his hosts not only despised the Nazis but had a tight connection to the French resistance group Morhange and its founder, Marcel Taillandier.

La Révolution aurait-elle connu un autre cours si Robespierre n'avait été celui qu'il était ? La psychologie de l'"Incorruptible" traquée dans tous ses méandres pour un livre surprenant. Maximilien Robespierre reste le personnage le plus controversé de la Révolution française, en même temps qu'une figure historique étudiée dans le monde entier. Max Gallo, historien de métier et biographe aux succès éditoriaux considérables, brosse ici un portrait psycho-historique de Robespierre.

A true cycling nut would be hard pushed to name all 36 races in just a ‘normal’ UCI World Tour. But there are so many more: 375 on the European Tour alone and many more on the America Tour (80), the Asia Tour (65), and the Africa Tour (45). It’s a year-long schedule, most of it unfamiliar. They may be amazing, they may be odd, but all have their place in the Sticky Bottle calendar. Big races and small ones find a place in Sticky Bottle as well as the relatively unknown. Here are personal and historical tales of cycling wonder and woe, plus a healthy smattering of the bizarre.

More than 40,000 listeners have enjoyed this story on cassette. Now anyone who's ever dreamed of getting away from it all can enjoy the charms and challenges of A Year in Provence on CD! Peter Mayle and his wife had been to Provence as tourists. They had dreamed of one day trading the long, gray...

Henry II had all the gifts of the gods. He was charismatic, clever, learned, empathetic, a brilliant tactician, with great physical strength and an astonishing self-belief. Henry was the creator of the Plantagenet dynasty of kings, who ruled through eight generations in command of vast lands in Britain and Europe. Virtually unbeaten in battle, and engaged in a ceaseless round of conquest and diplomacy, Henry forged an empire that matched Charlemagne's.

Volume Five begins on an optimistic note. The French recognition of the United States on February 6, 1778, along with the promise of military assistance, renewed Washington’s confidence in eventual success. But before that day arrived in 1781, three years of hardship, privation, and suspense would intervene. Throughout this ordeal George Washington’s towering presence was the catalyst that kept everything together.

When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate 16th-century villagers.

Les Presses Universitaires de France et Frémeaux & Associés proposent cette biographie de Jeanne d'Arc, expliquée et racontée par Franck Collard, professeur d'histoire médiévale à l'Université de Paris-Nanterre. Entre sa naissance à Domrémy en 1412 et sa mort sur le bûcher en 1431, la Pucelle d'Orléans bouleverse assurément le cours de la guerre de Cent Ans ; mais plus encore, elle nourrit l'imaginaire et catalyse les passions.

In the midst of the devastating Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Jean de Carrouges, a Norman knight, fresh from combat in Scotland finds his wife, Marguerite, accusing squire Jacques Le Gris of brutally raping her. A deadlocked court decrees a “trial by combat” that also leaves Marguerite’s fate in the balance. For if her husband loses the duel, she will be put to death as a false accuser. While enemy troops pillage the land, and rebellion and plague threaten the lives of all, Carrouges and Le Gris meet in full armor on a walled field in Paris.

The first full history of the pioneering Special Forces units of World War II, dropped behind German lines into France to assist with the D-Day landings, told by a former U.S. Special Forces colonel with unique access to surviving veterans.

A few days into her stop in Paris, Janice meets Christophe, the cute butcher down the street - who doesn't speak English. Through a combination of sign language and Franglais, they embark on a whirlwind Paris romance. She soon realizes that she can never return to the world of twelve-hour workdays and greasy corporate lingo. But her dwindling savings force her to find a way to fund her dreams again.

"In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling account of how Benjamin Franklin - 70 years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French - convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy. When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues....

Paul Johnson's book is a refreshing return to a concept whose time has come once again: the Great Man theory of biography. It serves as "the greatest possible refutation of those who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than the powerful wills of men and women". Napoleon truly was the Great Man of his age, a towering and terrible genius who managed to conquer the Continent.

Even before Susan Herrmann Loomis wrote her now-classic memoir, On Rue Tatin, Americans have been compelled by books about the French's ease with cooking. With In a French Kitchen, Loomis—an expat who long ago traded her American grocery store for a bustling French farmer's market—demystifies in lively prose the seemingly effortless je ne sais quoi behind a simple French meal.

"A 10 ans, on aurait payé pour le voir jouer. Les recruteurs se pressaient autour des terrains." Dès ses débuts à l'AS Bondy, le talent de Kylian Mbappé a fait l'unanimité. Son avenir était tout tracé dans les plus grands clubs européens. De nombreux témoignages dévoilent les secrets de sa formation à l'INF Clairefontaine, puis à l'AS Monaco. "Mbappé, Le Petit Prince" raconte aussi son éclosion en Ligue des champions jusqu'à son transfert colossal au PSG durant l'été 2017.

"We are all travelers in the 'wilderness of the world' - travelers with a donkey." So Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend on completing this enchanting account of a journey in rural France in 1878. Alone with his pack-donkey Modestine, and showing total disregard for discomfort, Stevenson relishes to the full his walking tour of the Cevennes.

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.

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.