Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [23]
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2002). This multiple-award-winning book opens with this sentence: “For six months in 1919, Paris was the capital of the world.” Indeed it was, as the peacemakers—from the Big Four countries (Britain, France, Italy, and the United States) and Japan—met there every day to create the terms of the peace treaty concluding World War I. (Others who came to Paris as peacemakers included Lawrence of Arabia and Ho Chi Minh.) As Richard Holbrooke writes in his foreword, “The road from the Hall of Mirrors to the German invasion of Poland only twenty years later is usually presented as a straight line”; MacMillan, however, refutes this, arguing that the peacemakers have been unfairly blamed for mistakes that were made later. This is a fascinating and ultimately timely book for the twenty-first century, as some of the major problems we face today have their roots in decisions made in Paris in 1919: the Balkan wars between 1991 and 1999; the war in Iraq, whose borders reflect the rivalry between France and Britain; a homeland for the Kurds; tension between Greece and Turkey; and a severe situation between Arabs and Jews “over land that each thought had been promised them.”
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The Second World War, Winston Churchill (Houghton Mifflin, 1948). When my husband walked into the room as I was compiling this bibliography, he asked, “Why don’t you just tell everyone to read Churchill’s work and be done with it?” He and I are both enormous fans of Churchill, and his question makes a good point. This six-volume work is Churchill’s masterpiece, and Churchill was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1953. A boxed set of the volumes in paperback was published by Mariner Books in 1986.
A Soldier’s Story, Omar N. Bradley (Modern Library War Series, 1999; originally published in 1951 by Henry Holt). Novelist Caleb Carr is editor of this fine series—other volumes include Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs and Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812—and in his introduction to the series he makes several notable points about military history. He reminds us of the general attitude in the United States during the sixties and early seventies, when admitting to an interest in human conflict was most unpopular. Military history enthusiasts, he points out as well, are often among the most well-read people we’ll ever meet, and they are also usually quite knowledgeable in discussions of political and social history. “The reason for this,” he explains, “is simple: the history of war represents fully half the tale of mankind’s social interactions,” and one cannot understand war without also understanding the political situation, cultural developments, and social issues of the time. Military history, Carr notes, “is neither an obscure nor a peculiar subject, but one critical to any understanding of the development of human civilization. That warfare itself is violent is true and unfortunate; that it has been a central method through which every nation in the world has established and maintained its independence, however, makes it a critical field of study.” Omar Bradley—better known as the “GI General”—is often referred to as the greatest military tactician of our time, and though this classic isn’t limited to World War II in France, the D-Day assault and the liberation of Paris are treated at length.
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, Marc Bloch (Norton, 1968). “Much has been, and will be, written