Best French History Books
Here you will get Best French History Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Sprinting Through No Man's Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France
Author: by Adin Dobkin
B08DHSFM4Q
Little A (July 1, 2021)
July 1, 2021
The inspiring, heart-pumping true story of soldiers turned cyclists and the historic 1919 Tour de France that helped to restore a war-torn country and its people. On June 29, 1919, one day after the Treaty of Versailles brought about the end of World War I, nearly seventy cyclists embarked on the thirteenth Tour de France.
From Paris, the war-weary men rode down the western coast on a race that would trace the country’s border, through seaside towns and mountains to the ghostly western front. Traversing a cratered postwar landscape, the cyclists faced near-impossible odds and the psychological scars of war.
Most of the athletes had arrived straight from the front, where so many fellow countrymen had suffered or died. The cyclists’ perseverance and tolerance for pain would be tested in a grueling, monthlong competition. An inspiring true story of human endurance, Sprinting Through No Man’s Land explores how the cyclists united a country that had been torn apart by unprecedented desolation and tragedy.
2. A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Author: by Sonia Purnell
B07DN155VV
April 9, 2019
English
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERChosen as a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by NPR, the New York Public Library, Amazon, the Seattle Times, the Washington Independent Review of Books, PopSugar, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, BookBrowse, the Spectator, and the Times of LondonWinner of the Plutarch Award for Best BiographyExcellentThis book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.
The New York Times Book Review”A compelling biography of a masterful spy, and a reminder of what can be done with a few brave people – and a little resistance.” – NPR”A meticiulous history that reads like a thriller.” – Ben MacintyreA never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine.
In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.” The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill’s “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and-despite her prosthetic leg-helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.
3. Letters to Camondo
Author: by Edmund de Waal
English
192 pages
0374603480
A tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moise de CamondoLetters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Muse Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art.
The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, the Rothschilds of the East, who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors, and fixtures of Belle poque high society, as well as being targets of antisemitismmuch like de Waal’s relations, the Ephrussi family, to whom they were connected.
Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with art for his son, Nissim; after Nissim was killed in the First World War, the house was bequeathed to the French state. Eventually, the Camondos were murdered by the Nazis.
After de Waal, one of the world’s greatest ceramic artists, was invited to make an exhibition in the Camondo house, he began to write letters to Moise de Camondo. These fifty letters are deeply personal reflections on assimilation, melancholy, family, art, the vicissitudes of history, and the value of memory.
4. The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France
Author: by James McAuley
English
320 pages
030023337X
A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destructionThe depths of French anti-Semitism is the stunning subject that Mr. McAuley lays bare…. [He] tells this haunting saga in eloquent detail.
As French anti-Semitism rises once again today, the effect is nothing less than chilling. Diane Cole, Wall Street JournalElegantly written and deeply moving….[A] haunting book. David Bell, New York Review of Books In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jewspillars of an embattled communityinvested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps.
In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-sicle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourtthe Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d’AnversMcAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of invading France’s cultural patrimony.
5. Napoleon: A Life
Author: by Andrew Roberts
0143127853
Penguin Books
English
The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the acclaimed author of Churchill and The Last King of Americawinner of the LA Times Book prize, finalist for the Plutarch prize, winner of the Fondation Napoleon prize and a New York Times bestseller A thrilling tale of military and political genius Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer.
The Washington PostAusterlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.
Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine.
6. American Colonies: The Settling of North America, Vol. 1
Author: by Alan Taylor
Penguin Books
English
544 pages
A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American RevolutionsIn the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.
Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes.
In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss.”Formidable … Provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity.” -The New York Times Book Review
7. A Year at the Chateau: As seen on the hit Channel 4 show
Author: by Strawbridge
English
1841884618
978-1841884615
THE ENTERTAINING AND HEARTWARMING SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. Like many couples, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th\-century fairytale chteau, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat.
Throwing caution to the wind, Dick and Angel swapped their two\-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with their two young children Arthur and Dorothy.
Sharing their full journey for the first time, A Year at the Chteau follows Dick and Angel from when they first moved to France in the depths of winter and found bedrooms infested with flies, turrets inhabited by bats, the wind rattling through cracked windows, and just one working toilet, which flushed into the moat, through to the monumental efforts that went into readying the chteau for their unforgettable wedding and their incredibly special first Christmas.
8. The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream
Author: by Charles Spencer
B084X4QP56
September 17, 2020
English
As gripping as any thriller. History doesn’t get any better than this’ BILL BRYSON’A brilliant read Game of Thrones but in the real world’ ANTHONY HOROWITZPICKED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, THE GUARDIAN, THE DAILY MAIL AND THE DAILY EXPRESS.
The sinking of the White Ship in 1120 is one of the greatest disasters England has ever suffered. In one catastrophic night, the king’s heir and the flower of Anglo-Norman society were drowned and the future of the crown was thrown violently off course.
In a riveting narrative, Charles Spencer follows the story from the Norman Conquest through to the decades that would become known as the Anarchy: a civil war of untold violence that saw families turn in on each other with English and Norman barons, rebellious Welsh princes and the Scottish king all playing a part in a desperate game of thrones.
All because of the loss of one vessel the White Ship the medieval Titanic. Highly enjoyable’ Simon HefferBrilliant’ Dan JonesFascinating’ Tom Bower
9. The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
Author: by Nick Lloyd
Liveright (March 30, 2021)
English
688 pages
A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt.
This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918.
Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter.
10. Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast
Author: by Cynthia Saltzman
English
336 pages
0374219036
One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Ten Best Books of May”A highly original work of history … [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two. Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street JournalA captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from VeniceCynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797.
Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice.
11. A Year in Provence
Author: by Peter Mayle
0679731148
Vintage (June 4, 1991)
English
NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubron with his wife and two large dogs.
He endures January’s frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhne Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provenal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.
12. Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766
Author: by Fred Anderson
B0012D1CY2
Vintage
December 18, 2007
In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years’ War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America.
Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly.
This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers.
13. Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog: Sniffing Out the Perfect Plot in Provence
Author: by Jamie Ivey
B076QHCSLL
Skyhorse
May 22, 2013
There is a moment every morning when the countryside takes a pause. The birds stop singing, the dogs choke back their barks, and cats pause mid-stride.Everything waits. It’s in this vacuum that a man working alone has the best chance of finding truffles…
The plot of land was perfect, just what they’d been looking for, offering expansive views across the valley and within walking distance of the local village. There was only one small problem, there was no house. And yet the land was affordable and came, the agent promised, with a possible income from a copse of truffle oaks.
Just after the birth of their first daughter, after leaving the London rat race behind, here was a chance for Jamie and his wife to finally realize their dream of owning a property. With one final salivating glance at the oak trees the decision was made.
All they needed now was a dog. And their quest to find and train a truffle dog turns out to be as full of hidden discoveries as a truffle hunt itself. With delicious humor and superb storytelling, Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog is sure to delight anyone who loves dogs, food, and rural France.
14. A History of France
Author: by John Julius Norwich
B088M2CGS9
October 2, 2018
English
An engaging, enthusiastic, sympathetic, funny journey through French history from the New York Timesbestselling author of Absolute Monarchs (The Wall Street Journal). Beginning with Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the first century BC, this study of French history comprises a cast of legendary charactersCharlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Marie Antoinette, to name a fewas John Julius Norwich chronicles France’s often violent, always fascinating history.
From the French Revolutionafter which neither France nor the world would be the same againto the storming of the Bastille, from the Vichy regime and the Resistance to the end of the Second World War, A History of France is packed with heroes and villains, battles and rebellionwritten with both an expert command of detail and a lively appreciation for the subject matter by this true master of narrative history (Simon Sebag Montefiore).
15. Paris: From the Air
Author: by Jeffrey Milstein
English
208 pages
1599621622
Combining daring aerial photography with the restricted airspace over Paris provides both breathtaking and unparalleled views. From sunrise to sunset, Paris is one of the most photographed cities in the world. Shooting with the newest high-resolution medium-format professional cameras while leaning out of helicopters making steep turns with the door off, Milstein captures the highly detailed, iconic, straight-down images that set his work apart.
Milstein’s distinctive style-straight down-leads to fresh insights of the urban design of this great city. In a way that is impossible from street level, you can see the old neighborhoods of Montmartre and Montparnasse; iconic historical monuments like the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe or the Invalides; and modern Paris like La Dfense or the new neighborhoods around the Bibliothque Nationale.
As a bonus, there is a portfolio of images of the gardens and buildings of Louis XIV’s great palace, Versailles. Milstein brings his unique and unmatched aerial vistas of Paris to life-every angle, every moment, every season. This is sure to be treasured by tourists and Parisians alike.
