Customer Reviews

Paris in the Third Reich: A history of the German occupation, 1940-1944

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...un buen libro, acerca de una epoca negada hoy en dia por todos los franceses, nos acerca a aquel Paris de la ocupacion en que,haciendo a un lado el patriotismo habia que tolerar e incluso ser amable con los hunos ocupantes y de algun modo sobrevivir en aquellos dias que se antojan a años luz de distancia cuando no es asi...pasado el tiempo, en agosto de 1944 los parisinos y los franceses en general de algun modo, por la cercania de los soldados aliados,reencontraron su valor y se sintieron patriotas de nuevo, saliendo de aquel mareo que les habia ocasionado aquel fatidico mayo de 1940 en que habian corrido a refugiarse en los brazos del anciano Mariscal Petain,a quien tan mal pagaron en 1945.

The enormous resources that Holt Rinehart placed at the disposal of this writer have been almost entirely wasted. What's worse, I seem to be reading the same book repeatedly. Maybe the same dim-bulb editor has been cloned (in this instance, a Thomas Wallace was sent forth).

From the margin notes, on various pages:

"Had plenty of potential; fails completely...badly written & edited... absence of a comprehensive dramatis personae of French & German officials is mind-boggling...Pryce-Jones' verbosity can be weighed in tonnage; redundancies abound;

"Mocks the quality of other writers' work at the same time that he himself writes poorly; endless paragraphs & interminable 'laundry lists' of unimportant people destroys continuity; first decently written creative sentence on page 89;

"Historical context missing, superb photos of scenes in Paris between 1940-45 are unanimously undated & are almost never logically located in the book opposite relevant text; sophomoric 'in fact' & other rhetorical abuses;

"States that famine - an indispensable condition that led to the French Revolution in 1789, & which probably reappeared during the siege of Paris in 1870-71 - had not existed in Paris for 'centuries' prior to 1940-41;

"Unattributed quotation; a complete non-entity is implausibly in on the big secret @ the impending invasion of Russia; lengthy quotations aren't indented; plural/singular editing goof; pointless elaboration; rambling nonsense;

"Entire bottom of page, a mess & story ending botched; idiotic analogy; portentous 'cue' as to what's coming next; writing has dramatically improved (too late);

"Chronological mishmash; nonsense; endless story - who could possibly remember the original point of it by the time the paragraph finally ends?; still impossible to understand after 4th reading;

"Not all of the respondents interviewed in the pre-epilogue interviews are introduced with historical & context-providing information (dates of birth or age in 1940; role in, or experience during the occupation, which provides the reason for their being interviewed; post-war fate); nor are they listed in alphabetical order, which matters because they're not individually listed in the table of contents;

"Author fails to explain why an interviewee referred to a powerful collaborationist Paris-Soir editor as an 'elevator operator'; interesting passage @ Jean Leguay in a post-epilogue interview ruined due to its microscopic, illegible type-size; likewise, interview of Gerhard Heller also unreadable."

It's not a total loss. The photos in their own right are superb; some of the first-person & historical accounts of the war in 1940 & the ensuing occupation are invaluable; & the index will, some day, prove useful.

But what a pain in the ass it was to read. It's August 25th, 1944*, all over again, when you've finally made it to the end of Paris In The 3rd Reich.

*The liberation of Paris from Nazi tyranny, and a day of festivity without equal in the 20th Century. Recommended: Gardner Botsford's eyewitness account, in his memoir, "A Life of Privilege, Mostly" (2003).