Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Picture Paris Lost..., May 4, 2000
If Hitler had his way, there would be no Notre Dame, none of Paris' beautiful bridges, no Eiffel Tower. The Allies didn't stop him, a brave German general did. At a tremendous personal risk, he resolved not to be the man to destroy the most beautiful city in the world. The story is told with the in-your-face realism of two journalists. Yet it's full of humor and even downright silliness. Would-be soldier Enrnest Hemingway captured a German soldier and relieved him of his pants. Why? He figured no man would escape half-naked. He was right. This isn't about troop movements, it's about real people risking their lives (and those of their families) to liberate Paris. After all, Eisenhower didn't think he had enough fuel or time to fight a mini-war for Paris. He desperately needed to push east to Germany. So how did it all happen? Read the book, in Paris if you can, but whever you can find a good lamp. Is Paris Burning? will keep you up late at night.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Book!, August 17, 2000
Is Paris Burning? is one of the best books that Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins have wrote together. A huge job, a piece of history novel, good as only a few can be, with a great work of investigation; interviews with people like General Dietrich von Choltitz, (who recieved the order from Adolf Hitler, to burn Paris, in case that the defense couldn't be accomplish) or for example the Chief of Operations in Europe, the General Dwight Eisenhower. As usual in their books, Lapierre and Collins, put the reader inside of one of the most importants chapters in the history of the XX century, the liberation of Paris, with precisions of days, hours, and places. The order of Hitler, the beginning of the resistance, the slow arrival of the allied, the clear disobedience of General Von Choltitz.... in fact, a crucial moment in the history of one of the most beautiful citys in the world, a turning point in the development of the Second World War. A different way to learn history.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History that Reads Like a Stephen King Novel, April 6, 2002
As part of Adolf Hitler's nihilistic resolution to decimate all traces of his infamous conquests and satanic occupations, Paris was to turn into a victim of Warsaw proportions. Lapierre and Collins masterfully direct the reader to the grueling scenario Generalfeldmarschall Dietricht von Choltitz had to endure: a German army turned decadent from Parisian amenities; allied troops slowly filling in the fringes of the French capital; and most importantly, Hitler's irreversible obsession to obliterate le Champs Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the perennial scars of European history.Hopscotching between enemy lines, the authors draw the nauseating political picture of Paris during August of 1944 with Resistance militias and FFI agents vying for eventual supremacy, de Gaulle battling against time and the insensitive Eisenhower to avoid internal military strife and eventual Communist hegemony, and Wehrmacht officers contemplating the insurmountable fate of the City of Lights. They also explain in detail the military background of the liberation of northwest France and the strategic and political dilemma facing the Supreme Command of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: chasing after the subdued German army all the way to the Rhine or liberating a Paris overshadowed by the hammer and the sickle. "Is Paris Burning?" is superbly documented, intelligently written, and scrutinizingly researched. The real accounts of heroes and antiheroes, mothers and sons, Fascists and Communists, French and German alike are spellbinding and Homeric.
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