Summary: Putting the “la” into “Ooh la”
Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
C’est Paris!
1
Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
Tag Archives: art
Bibliothèque nationale de France – Richelieu
Whales
Summary – fluky shots of humpbacks
Water
Summary: a many splendored thing
Hands
Summary: what it says on the tin… and a foot
Standing Tall: living with motor neuron disease, by Samantha Whittaker
Summary: a poetry of courage
“Silence – like a Quaker meeting.”
And like a Quaker meeting, Samantha Whittaker breaks this silence with her deeply considered words. Standing Tall is her first book, a collection of her poetry. As she explains in the introduction poetry is something that she returned to writing after her diagnosis with motor neurone disease. “At 56 I was struck with this terrible disease… Nobody can understand me now… I used to chat and laugh so much… Standing tall is where you’ll find me/ When I die.”
Because of its subject matter, this is a desperately sad book. But it is also an awe-inspiring one. I have only been in the presence of true courage a couple of times in my life. This book reminded me of those times. Because in this book Whittaker unflinchingly confronts her disease and her life with it: “Reason, slobber, alive, decline/ Words that sum up…”
Standing Tall is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary woman.
Paris ’44, by Patrick Bishop
Summary: a gripping narrative of the liberation of Paris
Paris ’44 covers similar ground to the bestselling book, Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, focusing on the liberation of Paris from the Germans in 1944.
Bishop finds some novel perspectives on the story through recounting the experiences of JD Salinger and Ernest Hemmingway in the fighting in France. Bishop is also much less generous to the German commander of the Paris garrison, von Choltitz, than were Collins and Lapierre: That von Cholititz did not set Paris ablaze had little to do with his moral qualms and much more to do with the logistical difficulties of such an act of terrorism. Bishop is also rightly caustic about how the grossly collaborationist French police switched sides when they discerned how the tide of the war was turning.
The Paris uprising in 1944 was possibly the luckiest such insurrection in occupied Europe. Elsewhere resisters were encouraged with considerable cynicism by the Allied high command to give battle to the Germans to draw off forces from the main allied armies. But Paris was one of the few places where the allied armies moved to support the uprisings before the Germans had time to massacre them. The relief of Paris by a Free French armored division was something of which the Home Army in Warsaw, or the Maquis on the French Vercors massif could only dream.
It is a compelling story no matter how it is served up, and Bishop does this with quite some style.
aidanjmcquade 