bibliotheque

Journalist Ken Anderson analyzes claims made by historian Trevor Ravenscroft and others that the Holy Lance, which is said to have pierced the side of Jesus Christ, took center stage in Hitler's life and was the focal point of Hitler's ambitions to conquer...

Du parcours de Félix Faure (1841-1899), homme d'Etat de la IIIe République, on ne connaît que l'épisode mêlant vaudeville et tragédie d'un décès inattendu. Un trépas survenu le 16 février 1899 qui a suscité la réplique apocryphe : " Le président a-t-il...

An invaluable report by US Army personnel assembled immediately after liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp . This vast project, undertaken by German-speaking members of the Army's Psychological Warfare Division, somehow lay unpublished for...

Perhaps the best one-volume biography of de Gaulle, by the deputy leader of the opposition in the British House of Lords. Although this furrow has, as the author modestly acknowledges, been ``well and truly ploughed by many...much better qualified than...

De 1941 à 1943, à Amsterdam, une jeune femme juive de vingt-sept ans tient un journal. Le résultat : un document extraordinaire, tant par la qualité littéraire que par la foi qui émane. Une foi indéfectible en l'homme alors qu'il accomplit ses plus noirs...

A touching, three-dimensional portrait of the Polish-born scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner. Armed with new archival material, including eloquent letters Marie Curie (18671934) wrote to her husband, Pierre, after his death, Quinn (A Mind of Her...

« "Un procès comme celui-là n'est jamais clos, il ne finira jamais d'être plaidé", écrit François Mauriac le lendemain du verdict du 15 août 1945 qui condamne Philippe Pétain à la peine de mort. Peine commuée en détention perpétuelle par le général de...

The memoirs of the legendary Skorzeny appear here in its first unabridged English edition. Skorzeny's fame began with the successful raid to free Benito Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, Italy in 1943. His elite commandos surprised Italian guards in a daring...

Disposant d’archives inédites et de témoignages encore inconnus, Arnaud de Chantérac reprend toute l’affaire Darlan. D’abord, il replace le meurtre dans son contexte historique. Pour cela, il raconte l’histoire secrète de l’Afrique du Nord de 1941 à 1942....

Non, tout le monde n'est pas devenu pétainiste après la débâcle ! Non, tous les mouvements de résistance n'ont pas été noyautés par les communistes à la solde de Moscou ! En s'appuyant sur de nombreuses archives, dont celles du mouvement Libération-Sud,...

L'histoire de deux générations d'une famille bourgeoise et de sa déchéance croissante. On assiste ainsi à la mort de toute une société à travers un cercle infernal où les fils doivent inéluctablement retrouver les vices de leurs pères. "Pendant que je...

" Le maréchal Pétain fut-il un traître ou non ? Les Français qui crurent en la parole du vainqueur de Verdun et le firent roi en 1940 ont-ils été trompés par lui ? Comme je n'ai jamais grenouillé dans les marais de Vichy, de Londres et d'Alger, mon propos...

Que savons-nous sur l'extermination des Juifs ? Tout ou presque tout sur l'organisation du crime, les méthodes appliquées, le nombre des victimes. Peu de choses assurées, en revanche, sur le moment et la manière dont fut décidé le crime, sur la trame...

Alors que la IVe République s'enlise dans les coalitions ministérielles instables, dans les conflits coloniaux et dans les difficultés économiques et sociales, Pierre Mendès France (1907-1982) est investi comme président du conseil le 18 juin 1954. L'affirmation...

The murderers are still among us, but Zuroff, coordinator of Nazi war crimes research for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and others like him continue to hunt them; retelling the story of this quest ought to be more exciting. Fifty years after the Holocaust,...

A dry history of the Nazi rocket program, concentrating on the development of liquid fuels for missiles. Neufeld, curator of WW II history at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, traces the history of the V-2 ballistic missiles catapulted...

This biography of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal is so well written that it often seems like a thriller rather than a serious examination of the aftermath of the Holocaust filtered through one survivor's experience. Levy's journalistic training (he...

Beevor (The Spanish Civil War, 1983, etc.) and Cooper (editor, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper, 1992, etc.) have created what should surely become one of the definitive works on the Paris liberation. The authors take the reader through the...

Peskov, a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, tells the story of a Russian religious dissident who, in 1932, took his wife into the remote Siberian Taiga and remained there, effectively frozen in time, until the 1990s. In 1978, while flying over the...

A one-volume edition of Hamilton's (JFK: Reckless Youth, 1992) three-volume biography, which won the Whitbread Award. This is, strictly speaking, history made personal--which is just the way Montgomery saw it. Montgomery's relations with Churchill, de...

The Gambinos—they arrived in America from Sicily when the '20's roared with bootleg liquor. For thirty years they fought a bloody battle for control of New York's underworld to emerge as the nation's richest and most powerful crime family. Now Mafia expert...

Pourquoi le général de Gaulle a-t-il échappé aux nombreux attentats fomentés contre lui? ... parce que la police possédait, au sommet de l'O.A.S., un informateur exceptionnel (Pastis, alias Benoît...). Des années d'une lutte acharnée. ... la police avait...

Most books about the Nuremberg trials have focused on the jurisprudential aspects of this unprecedented event. Persico (Casey, 1990; Edward R. Murrow, 1988; etc.) has chosen to write an overview that offers a picture of the comparatively underreported...

In 1925, Pirandello--at age 58 entering the final decade of his life, his wife confined to a mental asylum, his beloved daughter in Brazil--fell in love with a 25-year-old actress, Marta Abba. From 164 of the 522 letters Abba donated to Princeton University...

Nearly a million Jews were consumed by the ovens of Treblinka before August 2, 1943. On that day 600 prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacked the Nazi guards, burned the camp, and fled into the nearby Polish forests. Of these, forty survived...

The Spandau Diary — what was in it? Why did the secret intelligence agencies of every major power want it? Why was a brave and beautiful woman kidnapped to get it? Why did a chain of deception and violent death lash out across the globe, from survivors...

Disregard the deceptive title. The prolific Hoyt (199 Days, The Last Kamikaze, etc.) offers an illuminating picture of the wide-ranging, if ultimately ineffectual, roles played by Hermann Wilhelm Goering in Nazi Germany's rise and fall. A WW I fighter...

Post-World War II scholarship and films like The Sorrow and the Pity have frequently replaced the old Gaullist notion of widespread resistance, and cultivated the impression that the French may well have been a "nation of collaborators," embracing the...

Alois Brunner, alias Alois Schmaldienst, alias Georg Fischer, alias Ali Mohammed, est le plus grand criminel nazi vivant. A 78 ans, il se terre aujourd'hui en Syrie alors qu'il fait l'objet de cinq demandes d'extradition pour crimes contre l'humanité....

A thorough and well-documented analysis by Paterson (History/U of Connecticut) of how Castro came to power in Cuba and why the United States failed to stop him. Drawing on U.S., Canadian, and British records, as well as considerable research in private...

My Life was written in Moscow in 1921- 1922, when Chagall was thirty-five years old. Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates...

Pendant près d'un demi-siècle, fuyant de couvents en monastères, il a disparu de la surface du globe. Comment Paul Touvier, ancien chef de la Milice lyonnaise, inculpé de crimes contre l'humanité, a-t-il pu si longtemps échapper aux recherches? Qui a...

A well-balanced account of the Cuban leader's life and career, with a generous amount of background information and convincing explanations of Castro's several changes of image- -idealistic student revolutionary, romantic bandit chief, leader of the nonaligned...

Once-over-lightly profiles of more than two score spies, code- breakers, defectors, moles, and saboteurs who've engaged in the intelligence trade during the 20th century. While the list of men and women in the author's gallery of rogues is somewhat arbitrary,...

On trouvera dans cet ouvrage la correspondance _ en partie inédite _ échangée de 1953 à 1970 entre le comte de Paris et le général de Gaulle ainsi que les comptes rendus établis par le Prince de ses entretiens d'abord privés puis officiels avec le président...

"Gossipy...Elabroately detailed...Greatly entertaining...Riva leaves no sequin unturned." The New York Times - Marlene Deitrich was considered one of the most glamorous stars of her day. A determined perfectionist with an incredible ego, her beauty, her...

'This is the best book we have had on Vivien Leigh, the most thoroughly and shrewdly researched, the most acute in its realization that Leigh was an actress who had to find herself in her parts if she was to do well, but who invariably began to destroy...

Eté 1944 : la France se libère du joug nazi. Un symbole de l'occupation ennemie demeure sur le sol français en la personne de collaborateurs inconditionnels. Il est impératif de les châtier. C'est l'épuration. A dire vrai, celle-ci a commencé un an plus...

"Faut-il ranger le devoir de mémoire au pupitre ? Non pas, mais que cesse ce rituel infantile consistant à s'indigner tous les six mois parce qu'un scoop révèle que des Français ont collaboré, ou que Vichy fut complice de la " Solution finale " : On le...

Ce recueil réunit la quasi totalité des contes et nouvelles écrits par Karen Blixen, ce qui constitue la majeure partie de son oeuvre, à l'exception de deux récits, La ferme africaine et Ombres sur la prairie, et d'un roman noir "romantique" , Les voies...

De 1940 à 1944, Lyon a été occupé deux fois. Entre ces deux occupations allemandes, l'enchaînement des événements fit de la cité la "capitale de la Résistance". Mais Lyon fut aussi, et c'est l'envers du décor, un foyer trouble où se mêlèrent des compromissions...

Schindler's List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler , who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the...

Almost as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall, the Hindenburg would have dwarfed today's 747's; it offered majestic, rapid, very comfortable Atlantic crossings and traveled (with its sister airship the Graf Zeppelin) over two million miles before its fiery...

All I ever did was to sell beer and whiskey to our best people. All I ever did was to supply a demand that was pretty popular. Why, the very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell the loudest about me. Some of the leading judges use the stuff....

In a vivid, fascinating portrait of Cuba's ``Maximum Leader,'' Quirk (The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910-29, 1973, etc.--not reviewed) traces Castro's evolution from marginalized radical to Communist dictator. Castro, the son of an uncultured...