Grant and Murray Ball, his travels to the ends of the earth with his close friend Ed Hillary, and more...

    The carnage had little impact on the course of the war, and Verdun ultimately came to symbolize the absurdity and horror of trench warfare.Ian Ousby offers a radical reevaluation of this cataclysmic battle, arguing that the French bear tremendous responsibility for the senseless slaughter. He shows how the battle’s roots lay in the Franco-Prussian war and how its legacy helped lay the groundwork for World War II. Merging intellectual substance with superb battle writing, The Road to Verdun is a moving and incisive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century.

    The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence, could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive.Financed by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, unlikely heroes—feisty graduate student Miriam Davenport, Harvard-educated classical scholar Varian Fry, beautiful and compelling heiress Mary Jayne Gold, and brilliant young Socialist and survivor of the Battle of Dunkerque Danny Bénédite and his British wife, Theo—cajole, outwit, and use every means possible to stave off the Nazis and newly installed Vichy government officials circling closer with each passing day. The château was a vibrant artistic salon, home to lively debates and clandestine affairs, to Sunday art auctions and subversive surrealist games. Relationships within the house were tense and arguments were common, but the will to survive kept the covert operation under wraps. Beyond the château's luscious façade war raged, yet hope reverberated within its halls. With the aid of their young rescuers, this diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.Villa Air-Bel is a powerfully told, meticulously researched true story. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs, and letters of the individuals involved while uncovering their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Filled with suspense, drama, and intrigue, Villa Air-Bel is an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history.

    Two centuries have passed since Chopin's birth, yet his legacy is all around us today. The quiet revolution he wrought influenced the development of Western music profoundly, and he is still probably the most widely studied and revered composer. For many, he is the object of a cult. Yet most people know little of his life, of the man, his thoughts and his feelings; his public image is a sugary blur of sentimentality and melodrama. Adam Zamoyski cuts through the myths and legends to tell the story of Chopin's life, and to reveal all that can be discovered about him as a person. He pays particular attention to recent revelations about the composer's health, and places him within the intellectual and spiritual environment of his day.

    That was on his first day at the front.Thrown into an open field to face German tanks and artillery fire, with only rifles and machine guns to defend themselves with, almost 2,000 men of his regiment were wiped out in only six days at the Eastern Front. At this rate, Ivan struggled to comprehend how he would survive the hundreds of battles that lay before him, with death seeming to be the only certainty.In his raw and trenchant memoir, Ivan recounts the terror and despair faced by a Red Army soldier on the Eastern Front.He has no sympathy for Stalin and his incompetent commanders, who sought awards and recognition at the expense of their soldiers’ lives. He simply wanted to serve his country.It is rare to find first-hand accounts of the Great Patriotic War from Red Army soldiers, as many did not survive to tell the tale. For the first time, Ivan reveals his gripping recollections of battles, times, places, and people encountered throughout World War II, from when he was drafted in 1941 until their victory in 1945.These recollections he dared not put on paper until 1992.

    This book may well be the Bible of Yé-Yé .”—Boyd Rice

    A courtesan, she became Louis XV's official mistress and was fêted as one of France's most beautiful women. On Louis XV's death she became vulnerable to those secretly longing for her downfall. Marie Antoinette had her imprisoned for a year, and in 1793 she was executed by the Revolutionary Tribunal for her aristocratic associations. Joan Haslip's classic biography shares the extraordinary and ultimately tragic story of du Barry's life and, in turn, illustrates the dazzling world of the eighteenth century royal court of France and the horrors of the Revolution.

    One of the most innovative and admired figures in the history of haute couture, Balenciaga was, said Schiaparelli, “the only designer who dares do what he likes.” He was, said Christian Dior,“the master of us all.” But despite his extraordinary impact, Balenciaga was a man hidden from view. Unlike today’s celebrity designers, he saw to it that little was known about him, to the point that some French journalists wondered if he existed at all. Even his most notable and devoted clients—Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Hutton, a clutch of Rothschilds—never met him. But one woman knew Balenciaga very well indeed. The first person he hired when he opened his Paris house (then furnished with only a table and a stool) was Florette Chelot, who became his top vendeuse—as much an adviser as a saleswoman. She witnessed the spectacular success of his first collection, and they worked closely for more than thirty years, until 1968, when Balenciaga abruptly closed his house without telling any of his staff. Youth-oriented fashion was taking over, Paris was in upheaval, and the elder statesman wanted no part of it. In The Master of Us All , Mary Blume tells the remarkable story of the man and his house through the eyes of the woman who knew him best. Intimate and revealing, this is an unprecedented portrait of a designer whose vision transformed an industry but whose story has never been told until now.

    It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way. Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden. They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the geology, the weather, food, climate, local folklore, accent and cultural identity. Wines must be drunk and food tasted. Recipes found and compared. The perfect tarte-tartin pursued. None of these things can be ignored or separated from the shape and size of parterre, fountain, herbaceous border or pottager. So this is a book filled with stories and information, some of it about French gardens and gardening, but most of it about what makes France unlike anywhere else. From historical gardens like Versailles,Vaux le Vicomte and Courances to the kitchen gardens of the Michelin chef Alain Passard. There are grand potagers like Villandry and La Prieure D'Orsan and allotments and back gardens spotted on the way. Monty celebrates the obvious French associations of food and wine and finds gardens dedicated to vegetables, herbs and fruit. It is a book that any visitor to France, whether gardeners or not, will want to read both as a guide and an inspiration. It is a portal to get under the French cultural skin and to understand the country, in all its huge variety and disparity, a little better.

    In June 1816, the flagship of a French expedition to repossess a colony in Senegal from the British set sail. She never arrived at her destination; her incompetent captain Hugo de Chaumareys, ignoring telltale signs of shallow waters, plowed the ship into a famously treacherous sandbar. A privileged few claimed the lifeboats while 146 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft and set adrift. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night, and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later only fifteen were alive. Meanwhile, those in the boats who made it to shore undertook a dangerous two-hundred-mile slog through the desert. Among the handful of survivors from the raft were two men whose written account of the fiasco became a bestseller that rocked France’s political foundations and provided graphic fodder for Géricault’s world-famous painting.

     Free BONUS Inside! Pierre-August Renoir, leader of the nineteenth-century Impressionist movement, spent his entire life perfecting his style. Rejected for decades, he depended on friends for a place to stay and money for painting supplies. Renoir lived in poverty until his forties, and when he was finally discovered and hailed as a great artist, his health began to fail him. Still, Renoir never gave up his passion for painting. When he became crippled by arthritis, Renoir painted confined to a wheelchair with the paintbrush bound to his wrist. His need to create beauty was the driving force of his life, and throughout rejections and deteriorating health, Renoir retained an optimism that is reflected in his paintings. Discover a plethora of topics such as Early Life in Poverty Success as a Portrait Artist The Dreyfus Affair The Price of Fame Losing the Use of His Hands Last Years and Death And much more! So if you want a concise and informative book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, simply scroll up and click the "Buy now" button for instant access!

    (...) By transcribing the events of his daily life as if they were episodes in an ongoing dream, by recording his dreams as if they embodied the true narrative of his waking existence, Leiris in effect defuses the distinction between two.

    But for English couple Richard and his wife Al, the cavernous, oak-beamed building in a sleepy hamlet of the Limousin region of France is perfect. Tussles with French bureaucracy allied with fierce storms that wreak havoc on the property do little to dampen resolve as they immerse themselves in the calm of this quiet corner of France, taking trips in Richard's balloon and starting their very own llama farm. Their colorful, often eccentric neighbors are always ready to lend a hand: the jovial ex-Gendarme and his wife, who is able to foretell the weather; a lonely widow who offers copious amounts of gateaux in exchange for convivial chat; and a brawny cattleman with suspicious motives in offering to clean up the couple's land. This often hilarious and heartwarming tale is one of obstacles overcome and dreams fulfilled.

    Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.

    Presenting photographs of legendary figures, among them the model Kiki, Modigliani, Picasso, Satie, Matisse, Leger, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Miro. Gossip and anecdotes aim to bring this world alive.