Book

This is the sort of book that makes collection development difficult--plenty of good reviews, but its relevance to our collection is unclear...

Gildea, Robert. Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation. Metropolitan Books.

Atlantic Monthly: “Stunning…succeeds brilliantly…nuanced and intricate.” Library Journal: “Extremely well-researched, highly readable, revisionist…An important book for interested lay readers and specialists in the field.” Contemporary Review: “To write good history is always difficult and to write well about the Occupation is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks facing any historian. Mr. Gildea has given us a good history.”History Today: “a riveting read which offers up new interpretative pathways. However, like all such books it must come with a health warning. Firstly, is it feasible to extrapolate from Chinon to the rest of France?...Secondly, to what extent, in down-playing ideological choices, is he creating a new straitjacket, that of the uncommitted centre which just muddle through?” New Statesman: “excellent…However fascinating Gildea’s picture of everyday life in the years 1940-1944, it is his dismantling of the Resistance legend that forms the spine of the book…Among Gildea’s finest qualities is an acutely developed sense of historical irony. One result of his scholarly labours is that no one will ever again be able to view the occupation as a crude division between German oppressors and French oppressed.” Foreign Affairs: “This distinguished British historian of France has written a very fine history of everyday life in the French heartland during the German occupation.”