Parler Paris Newsletter, Paris France

Books by American Authors
(Set in France or Authors Living in France)

In Alphabetical Order by Author Then Title

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A Shattered Peach: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today
By David A. Andelman

A revealing look at the powerful lessons the Treaty of Versailles has for us today. Veteran correspondent David Andelman offers a compelling new perspective on the origin of many of today’s most critical international issues. He turns the spotlight on the many errors committed by World War I peacemakers that ultimately led to crises from Iraq to Kosovo and wars from the Middle East to Vietnam. He focuses, too, on the small nations and minor players at Versailles, including figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Charles de Gaulle, who would later become boldfaced names. With a cautionary message for us today, he shows how world leaders dismissed repeated warnings from their experts and laid the groundwork for a host of catastrophic events.

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Murder in Belleville
By Cara Black

April in Paris, 1994, is hardly the stuff of song: forget lilacs and lights twinkling along the Seine and think riots and firebombings. Private investigator Aimée Leduc (Murder in the Marais) specializes in corporate security, but when Anaïs, an old friend and wife of an interior minister, sends her a terrified SOS from Belleville, an immigrants' quartier, the racial violence festering in the city explodes on a very personal level. Anaïs had intended to confront Sylvie, her husband's mistress, but when a car bomb fueled by Algerian plastique takes Sylvie's life, Anaïs begs Aimée to unravel the tangled threads that led to her death.
Aimée's investigations take her into the heart of the unrest surrounding the political status of illegal Algerian immigrants, or sans-papiers. What was the connection between Sylvie (also known as Eugénie, a pied-noir, or Algerian-born French citizen) and Mustafa Hamid, charismatic leader of the Alliance Fédération Libération, a humanitarian mission bent on stopping the forced repatriation of North African Magrébhins? Was Anaïs' husband being blackmailed by a radical faction of the AFL?

The jam-packed plot is occasionally hard to follow (and the intermittent presence of Yves, Aimée's fickle lover, is downright distracting), but Black's Paris, at times grimly threatening, is also wondrously vibrant:

She wondered how Sylvie/Eugénie fit into the melange that swelled the boulevard: the Tunisian Jewish bakery where a line formed while old women who ran the nearby hammam conversed with one and all from their curbside café tables, the occasional rollerblader weaving in and out of the crowd, the Asian men unloading garments from their sliding-door Renault vans, the Syrian butchers with their white coats stained bloody pink, the tall, ebony Senegalese man in a flowing white tunic, prayer shawl, and blue jogging shoes with a sport bag filled with date branches, a well-coiffed French matron tugging a wheeled shopping cart, a short, one-eyed Arabe man who hawked shopping bags hanging from his arms, and the watchful men in front of the Abou Bakr Mosque near the Métro.
Who needs lilacs when you have Paris in all of its confounding, confusing splendor? Francophiles and mystery fans alike will be waiting anxiously for Aimée's next outing. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
After a first-class debut in 1999's Anthony-nominated Murder in the Marais, sassy detective Aim?e Leduc returns, offering an intriguing glimpse of Paris's gruff Belleville district, known for its high concentration of Arab immigrants. The suspense begins immediately with Aim?e receiving a puzzling, urgent call from her friend Ana?s. On arriving at their meeting spot, Aim?e witnesses a car bombingAand soon learns that the bombing's victim was the mistress of Ana?s's government minister husband,... read more --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Murder in the Bastille
By Cara Black

From Publishers Weekly
PI Aimee Leduc is in the dark not only figuratively but literally after a mysterious attack leaves her blinded at the start of her fourth absorbing Paris mystery (after 2002's Murder in the Sentier). Aimee and her partner, computer expert Ren‚ Friant, face dual dilemmas as a client's recalcitrance to comply with a court request coincides with Aimee's misfortune. The diminutive Ren‚ must become the eyes of the team while Aimee makes do as best she can with her other senses. Meanwhile, with her attacker still on the loose and the police off on a wrong scent chasing a serial killer, Aimee remains a vulnerable target. Black loads her plot with Eastern European thugs, aggressive developers and other familiar villains, but she compensates the reader with the rich ambiance of Paris as well as a realistic and moving account of Aimee's coming to terms with her new condition. Some readers may be annoyed by the use of French words and phrases not obvious from context, but for the rest of us these authentic touches will be as welcome as the fresh butter on our morning croissant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Murder in the Marais
By Cara Black

From Publishers Weekly
The initial installment of a projected series of mysteries set in Paris, this standout first novel introduces dauntless private investigator Aim?e Leduc. The French-American, whose specialty is computer forensics, is confronted with a seemingly mundane task: to decipher an encrypted photograph from the '40s and deliver it to an old woman in the Marais (the historic Jewish quarter of Paris). When Aim?e arrives at the home of Lili Stein to present the photo, however, she finds the woman dead, a swastika carved into her forehead. Thus begins a thrilling, quick-paced chase involving neo-Nazis, corrupt government officials and fierce anti-Semitism. With the help of her partner, Ren?, a computer hacking expert, Aim?e uncovers tantalizing clues relating to German war veteran Hartmuth Griffe, the Jewish girl he saved from Auschwitz, a French trade minister and other enigmatic figures. But the data Aim?e and Ren? come up with only takes them so far. In order to understand the true motive behind the killing, Aim?e must delve into history, confronting older residents of the quarterAwho'd prefer she leave the past aloneAand doing some undercover work. The suspense is high as she fraternizes dangerously with the enemy, even becoming briefly involved with an Aryan supremacist. Black knows Paris well, and in her first-rate debut she deftly combines fascinating anecdotes from the city's war years with classic images of the City of Lights. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Although set in Paris in the early 1990s, Black's new series start harks back to World War II crimes. Private investigator Aim?e Leduc becomes involved when she discovers the body of an elderly Jewish woman whose forehead has been inscribed with a swastika. With the arrival of a German trade delegation, meanwhile, the existence of a powerful covert group comprising former SS officers becomes clear. Aim?e's subsequent investigation exposes the connection between a war-time romance gone wrong and... read more --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Murder in the Sentier
By Cara Black

From Publishers Weekly
After completing Anthony Award-nominee Black's third Aimee Leduc mystery, those who haven't read the first two in the series Murder in Belleville and Murder in the Marais won't rest easy until they've devoured the earlier volumes as well. One of the best new writers in the field today, Black sets her novels in a Paris so real one can hear and smell the street. Her characters are just as real, in particular her heroine, the daughter of an American, Sydney Leduc, who disappeared when Aimee was eight years old, and a Parisian cop, Jean-Claude Leduc, who was murdered and from whom she inherited a detective agency that specializes in computer security. Aimee has always wanted to know the truth about her missing mother, so when she gets a phone call from a woman with a German accent claiming to have known her mother in prison she agrees to meet the mysterious caller in the Sentier (the garment district). Back in the '60s, Sydney was involved with a gang of young terrorists. Some of them kidnapped a wealthy man and looted his home of bonds and art works. A former gang member knows the location of the treasure, and another is stalking the survivors of the gang, killing them off. What did her mother have to do with these people? How guilty was she of their crimes? And is she still alive? This is the stuff of a thoroughly engrossing story that's never less than compelling. The subtly sinister jacket photo of a Parisian street scene perfectly captures the spirit of the text.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
When a mysterious visitor promises contact with her long-lost mother, Aim e Leduc finds herself hot on the trail of the Seventies radicals with whom her mother was evidently associated. The result is not just good suspense but an affecting and realistic psychological study of a daughter's coming to terms with an absent parent. This is another high-class mystery from Black, whose previous works in the series (Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Marais) have the same indelible sense of... read more --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis
By Cara Black

At the start of Black's gripping seventh mystery to feature Parisian computer expert Aimée Leduc (after 2006's Murder in Montmartre), a distraught, late-night anonymous phone call distracts Aimée from her deadline and sends her to the courtyard of her Ile Saint-Louis building, where she finds an infant girl. After the caller never shows up for her baby (whom Aimée decides to care for), Aimé wonders if the woman may have become an "Yvette," a Jane Doe dragged from the Seine. She follows a tenuous lead to discover the caller's identity, bringing her Samaritan impulses into direct conflict with her business sense. A wonderfully complex plot is lent immediacy by environmental activists agitating against a proposed oil agreement—secondary characters who play a crucial role in the intrigue. This Paris has a gritty, edgy feel, and Black's prose evokes the sound of the Seine rising with the spring thaw. Aimée makes an engaging protagonist, vulnerable beneath her vintage chic clothing and sharp-witted exterior.

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Water from Stone: The Story of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve
By Jeffrey Greene

Award-winning author Jeffrey Greene provides a portrait, by turns lyrical and provocative, of J. David Bamberger's unlikely transformation from first, a vacuum cleaner salesman, then to co-founder and CEO of Church's Fried Chicken, to an internationally recognized conservationist. In fact, Greene tells two integrally related stories: the evolution of one man's business sense, applying profit incentives to land restoration and nature conservancy; and the creation of a Texas Hill Country preserve where he effectively demonstrates his own principles.

Growing up in rural Ohio during the Great Depression and World War II, Bamberger learned at an early age to shun waste, grow food productively, and admire the Amish for living in harmony with the land. His mother taught him to love the natural world and gave him a book that would set the course for his life: Pleasant Valley, by Louis Bromfield, a visionary American advocate for land restoration. Inspired by his new role model, Bamberger would say, "If I ever make money, I want to do what Bromfield did."

After finding that financial success, Bamberger bought what he describes as "the sorriest piece of land in Blanco County" and entered upon his decades-long effort to restore the ecological balance of 5,500 acres that had been virtually destroyed by more than a century of misuse. Naming his preserve Selah--from the Old Testament term meaning "pause and reflect"--Bamberger dedicates himself and his resources to protecting species and educating school children, conservation groups, government officials, and everyone else who will listen to his central message, delivered with evangelical zeal: We must take care of the earth, and anyone can help.

Today, David and his wife, Margaret, have received many awards, and he has been featured in The New Yorker, in Audubon, and on CNN and network news. But until now, no one has fully told the story of how a man with vision transformed a place--and in doing so, transformed himself.

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Educating Alice: Adventures of a Curious Woman
By Alice Steinbach

Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach had the courage to do something that many people only fantasize about -she left behind the life and career she'd fashioned for herself to begin a new chapter in her life.

In 1993, after sending off her two sons to college, Steinbach took a year's leave of absence from her job as a reporter and columnist at the Baltimore Sun. After almost twenty years of meeting deadlines, both personal and professional, she traveled to Europe on a journey of self-discovery and wrote about the experience in her acclaimed first book, Without Reservations. But a year wasn't enough. After returning home, Steinbach became even more restless with her old life. After much deliberation she made the decision to quit her job altogether and set off again, this time to combine three of her passions: learning, traveling and writing.

EDUCATING ALICE: Adventures of a Curious Woman (Random House; April 13, 2004; for May magazines), is Steinbach's funny and tender account of the time she spent roaming the world as an informal student taking lessons in such things as French cooking in Paris, traditional Japanese arts in Kyoto, Border-collie training in Scotland, and architecture and art in Havana. Along with insightful and vivid descriptions of the people and places she visited, Steinbach describes the pleasures and perils of being a student again, the challenges she faced, and what she learned about herself beyond the confines of her courses.

Though most of us can only imagine an endeavor as bold as Steinbach's, EDUCATING ALICE will inspire readers to examine their own lives and to find in this book new ways of expanding the boundaries of their experience.

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Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
by Alice Steinbach

In this engaging travelogue, Steinbach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer reeling with empty-nest syndrome, travels to Europe to "find herself" and assert her long-dormant independence. The search for self notwithstanding, she seems to spend a lot of time in Europe developing relationships and finding other people to pal around with, which makes for an interesting tale but seems to defeat her purpose. In France she begins a romance with another tourist; in London she takes up with a merry band of middle-class matrons; at Oxford she takes a course on the history of the English village; and in Milan she befriends a young American. Eventually, she does spend some time alone pondering the big questions and sending herself postcards (to record her impressions of places and events), and by the trip's conclusion she seems to have gained some badly needed perspective on her life. Steinbach doesn't take herself too seriously, though, and the light-hearted rendering of her misadventures makes the story both lively and entertaining.

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Rendezvous Eighteenth
by Jake Lamar

Rendezvous Eighteenth marks the emergence of an exciting voice in crime fiction. Ricky Jenks gave up life in the U.S. years ago and is content, if not happy, with his life as a piano player in a small café in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. He has many friends among the other African-Americans living in Paris and is happily, if casually, involved with a French Muslim woman.

But then everything changes. His American life comes crashing down on him when his estranged cousin wants help finding his runaway wife, whom he thinks might have come to Paris, even though he's vague about why. That same night Ricky finds a prostitute dead in his apartment building in Paris's Eighteenth Arrondissment, one of the most multicultural sections of Paris. That these two events could be connected is something he never imagines.

This intricate, absorbing thriller is ultimately much more than a suspense novel. Lamar's detailed and vibrant portrait of life in Paris is as much the story of a black man's alienation and redemption-indeed, the story of an entire community searching for a home-as it is a taut thriller about revenge, obsession, and murder

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If 6 Were 9
by Jake Lamar

In the wee hours of the morning, a phone call awakens Clay Robinette, once a disgraced reporter, now a happily married, happily tenured black professor. The caller is Reggie Brogus, a famous black militant who, after a mysterious seven-year exile, remade himself as a fire-breathing conservative professor. There's a dead body in Reggie's office and he's sure it's the work of government agents looking to frame him for his radical past. He needs Clay's help and trusts Clay's wry sense of humor and famous cool head to get him out of trouble. But Clay, dragged out of his bed into the winter night, recognizes the victim -- Jennifer Wolfsheim, aka Pirate Jenny, Clay's student and, for a brief time, his mistress. Knowing he too could be implicated in Jenny's death, Clay tries to cover up his knowledge of the murder; he gives Reggie a ride out of town, goes home, and gets back into bed as though the whole episode were a nightmare. But when he wakes up in the morning, his life slowly but surely begins to fall apart. Dragged into the nvestigation in spite of himself, Clay knows he must unmask the killer before he becomes the prime suspect. Is Reggie guilty after all? Is the murder indeed linked to the FBI and a long-ago counterintelligence operation? Or is the killer someone with a sterling reputation and a hidden sadistic streak?

Part whodunit, part conspiracy thriller, part social satire, If 6 Were 9 is a funny, fast-paced novel filled with vibrant characters, unexpected plot twists, and provocative ideas about the complexities of race and politics in America.

About the Author
JAKE LAMAR was born in 1961 in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from Harvard he spent six years writing for Time magazine. He is the author of the memoir Bourgeois Blues (1991) and the novels The Last Integrationist (1996) and Close to the Bone (1999). He lives in Paris.

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Never Tell Your Name
by Josie Levy Martin

World War II; a Jewish child secretly hidden by a courageous French nun during the German Occupation. This gentle memoir speaks to the trauma of war in all its haunting twists and its poignant impact long after war's end.

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Project Girl
By Janet McDonald

Selected by The Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year, Project Girl is the powerful account of a young woman's struggle to realize her dreams while remaining true to who she was before attending Ivy League schools and receiving impressive diplomas. It tells of the spectacular failures and unlikely comebacks of a ghetto kid whose academic talent opens doors onto a world of private schools, rich classmates, and plum jobs but who back home confronts a neighborhood of growing poverty, drug abuse, and crime. Project Girl is McDonald's story of her divided life and terrible battle to reconcile opposing worlds.

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Richard Wright, The Life and Times
By Hazel Rowley

Born in Mississippi in 1908, the grandson of former slaves, Richard Wright spent his teenage years chopping wood, carrying coal, scrubbing floors, and enduring a thousand indignities. Later, in novels such as Native Son and The Outsider as well as works of journalism and autobiography, he raised profoundly disturbing questions about the "nightmarish jungle" of race relations in contemporary America, offering profoundly pessimistic answers in return.
For his troubles, literary historian Hazel Rowley shows in this sweeping biography, Wright earned a large readership--even, for a time, a place on the bestseller lists and the top income-tax bracket. But, because he had joined the Communist Party as a young man, he was also denounced from the floor of the United States Senate--accused of anti-Americanism and even suspected of spying for Moscow--and his books were banned in several states and cities. Wright protested that he had repudiated Marxism years before, bitterly remarking, "The Western world must make up its mind as to whether it hates colored people more than it hates Communists." Eventually, a prophet without honor, he left his native country and lived out the rest of his years in France, where he is buried.

Rowley draws on a wealth of archival material (as she notes, "Wright kept everything--drafts of manuscripts, letters, photographs, hotel bills, newspaper cuttings") and his body of work to portray the justly angry writer. The result is a welcome contribution to literary and historical studies. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Tête-à-Tête
By Hazel Rowley

No matter how many other lovers the radical French intellectuals and prolific writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre got involved with, their symbiotic relationship remained sacrosanct, providing them with great solace while causing the men and women they snared like two spiders in a sturdy web much anguish. Rowley, Richard Wright's groundbreaking biographer, reveals in full the chimerical nature and painful consequences of this infamous alliance. Patiently and analytically, she chronicles the impetus and consequences of Sartre's relentless mania for seduction and Beauvoir's defensive bisexuality, and she details with some dismay the astonishing tangle of their vaguely incestuous, always manipulative affairs. Sartre financially supports the lovers he betrays, while Beauvoir is stunningly two-faced. But in spite of their exhaustingly complex and cruel love lives, Sartre and Beauvoir never stop writing or taking courageous stands against fascism, prejudice, sexism, and war. Ultimately, what Rowley so shrewdly and fairly reveals in this explicit and insightful double portrait is that these two charismatic champions for justice and freedom were committed at any cost to transmuting existence into art. Donna Seaman, Copyright © American Library Association.

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Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris
By Sarah Turnbull

The charming true story of a spirited young woman who finds adventure--and the love of her life--in Paris.

"This isn't like me. I'm not the sort of girl who crosses continents to meet up with a man she hardly knows. Paris hadn't even been part of my travel plan..."

A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor. Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frédéric together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decided to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite for vichyssoise, the feisty Sydney journalist does her best to fit in, although her conversation, her laugh, and even her wardrobe advertise her foreigner status.

But as she navigates the highs and lows of this strange new world, from life in a bustling quatier and surviving Parisian dinner parties to covering the haute couture fashion shows and discovering the hard way the paradoxes of France today, little by little Sarah falls under its spell: maddening, mysterious, and charged with that French specialty-séduction.

An entertaining tale of being a fish out of water, Almost French is an enthralling read as Sarah Turnbull leads us on a magical tour of this seductive place-and culture-that has captured her heart.