And the Show Went On, Alan Riding
And the Show Went On, Alan Riding
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And the Show Went On
Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris

Author: Alan Riding

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 16 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/27/2010


Synopsis

In the weeks after the Germans captured Paris, theaters, opera houses, and nightclubs reopened to occupiers and French citizens alike, and they remained open for the duration of the war. Alan Riding introduces a pageant of twentieth-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist.

We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies in Paris studios (more than two hundred were produced during this time). We see that pro-Fascist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Robert Brasillach flourished, but also that Camus's The Stranger was published and Sartre's play No Exit was first performed—ten days before the Normandy landings.

Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, And the Show Went On sheds a clarifying light on a protean and problematic era in twentieth-century European cultural history.

About Alan Riding

Alan Riding is a Brazilian-born Briton who studied economics and law before becoming a journalist and writer. He has worked for Reuters, the Financial Times, the Economist, and the New York Times, reporting from the United Nations in New York, Latin America, and Western Europe. During the final twelve years before he retired from journalism in 2007, he was the European cultural correspondent for the New York Times, based in Paris. Alan is the author of the bestselling book Distant Neighbors and coauthor of Essential Shakespeare Handbook and Opera. He lives in Paris with his wife, Marlise Simons, a writer for the Times.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sketchbook on July 11, 2024

Alan Riding, a good reporter, drowns himself and readers in his research. He needs to turn it over to an editor, as they used to do at TIME, who will assign a writer. Some material is fresh and interesting. Some is very ambiguous. Some is filler. There's very little "original" reporting. Despite fau......more

Goodreads review by Julie on December 03, 2013

I give this 4-stars from sheer awe at the breadth of research and in recognition of the value of this book as a resource. If you are at all interested in--as a personal pursuit or as part of scholarly research--France, French literature, art, cinema, World War II, or the presence and impact of the a......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on August 03, 2018

Review to come.......more

Goodreads review by WB1 on April 23, 2013

On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a deserted Paris. The fact is that the French --who are not above lecturing the United States about morality --behaved more or less like cowards. They didn't quite welcome the Germans with open arms. But they hardly rejected them. Theaters, opera houses, c......more

Goodreads review by Dvora on August 25, 2021

This is a very interesting and exhaustive account of all the cultural activity (writing/poetry, painting/sculpture, music, theater, cinema, cabaret) that went on in France after the Germans invaded and took over. Some was done by collaboration with the Nazis, some was done with the Nazis simply watc......more