Book Description
Compared to Casablanca by the Washington Post, this a page–turning story of a group of resistance workers who secreted downed Allied fighter pilots through France and into safety in Spain during World War II.
As war raged against Hitler's Germany, an increasing number of Allied fliers were shot down on missions against Nazi targets in occupied Europe. Many fliers parachuted safely behind enemy lines only to find themselves stranded and hunted down by the Gestapo. The Freedom Line traces the thrilling and true story of Robert Grimes, a 20–year–old American B–17 pilot whose plane was shot down over Belgium on Oct. 20, 1943. Wounded, disoriented, and scared, he was rescued by operatives of the Comet Line, a group of tenacious young women and men from Belgium, France, and Spain who joined forces to rescue the Allied aircrews and take them to safety. And on Christmas Eve 1943, he and a group of fellow Americans faced unexpected sudden danger and tragedy on the border between France and Spain.
The road to safety was a treacherous journey by train, by bicycle, and on foot that stretched hundreds of miles across occupied France to the Pyrenees Mountains at the Spanish border. Armed with guile and spirit, the selfless civilian fighters of the Comet Line had risked their lives to create this underground railroad, and by this time in the war, they had saved hundreds of Americans, British, Australians, and other Allied airmen.
Based on interviews with the survivors and in–depth archival research, The Freedom Line is the story of a group of friends who chose to act on their own out of a deep respect for liberty and human dignity. Theirs was a courage that presumed to take on a fearfully powerful foe with few defences.
Customer Reviews:
The Freedom Line.......2007-05-09
This is a wonderful book that describes a part of the European Theater in World War II that many Americans know little about. I sent a copy of the book to a friend and his wife who were in the resistance in Holland in WW II. They also loved the book and said it was an absolutely accurate and riveting account of the underground resistance movement in Europe. A wonderful read...far better than any contrived fiction. The folks who saved our downed Allied aircrew members and guided them to safety are true heros. Theirs is an amazing story of sacrifice and dedication.
good read but needed some extras.......2005-01-05
This is a well written book and reads well, but it would have been better if it had included photos of the people involved and the areas described. It also could have used an index.
Great Book, Would Make a Great Movie.......2004-12-09
Bob Grimes was twenty years old, a pilot in a B-17 on the way back from bombing Germany on October 20, 1943 when an FW-190 shot off the tail of his plane. Wounded he bailed out of the stricken plane. On the ground he was incredibly lucky. He fell into the hands of The Comet Line. This was a network of people from Brussels to Spain that helped downed British and American air crew to escape. This book uses the story of Grimes to tell the story of the Comet Line itself.
The Comet Line was the creation of an elegant young Belgian woman Dedee de Jongh. She ran the organization until she was captured and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp; she survived the war.
Parts of this story are seen in the movie "The Great Escape" where one of the escapees travels down the line to Spain. True, this is a dramatic story of people at their best in very dangerous situations.
An excellent read for todays generation.......2004-04-13
This is a perfect book for the present situation the world is experiencing today. This really shows how men and women who appreciate freedom sacrifice and put themselves in harms way. Peter Eisner is to be complimented and this book should be in every school library and a must read for all.
Average customer rating:
- A Great Read about a Fascinating Man
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Man Who had Been King: The American Exile of Napoleon's Brother Joseph
Patricia Tyson Stroud
Manufacturer: University of Pennsylvania Press
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ASIN: 0812238729 |
Book Description
Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and Spain, claimed that he had never wanted the overpowering roles thrust upon him by his illustrious younger brother Napoleon. Left to his own devices, he would probably have been a lawyer in his native Corsica, a country gentleman with leisure to read the great literature he treasured and oversee the maintenance of his property. When Napoleon's downfall forced Joseph into exile, he was able to become that country gentleman at last, but in a place he could scarcely have imagined.
It comes as a surprise to most people that Joseph spent seventeen years in the United States following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. In The Man Who Had Been King, Patricia Tyson Stroud has written a rich account--drawing on unpublished Bonaparte family letters--of this American exile, much of it passed in regal splendor high above the banks of the Delaware River in New Jersey.
Upon his escape from France in 1815, Joseph arrived in the new land with a fortune in hand and shortly embarked upon building and fitting out the magnificent New Jersey estate he called Point Breeze. The palatial house was filled with paintings and sculpture by such luminaries as David, Canova, Rubens, and Titian. The surrounding park extended to 1,800 acres of luxuriously landscaped gardens, with twelve miles of carriage roads, an artificial lake, and a network of subterranean tunnels that aroused much local speculation.
Stroud recounts how Joseph became friend and host to many of the nation's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens, and how his art collection played a crucial role in transmitting high European taste to America. He never ceased longing for his homeland, however. Despite his republican airs, he never stopped styling himself as "the Count de Survilliers," a noble title he fabricated on his first flight from France in 1814, when Napoleon was exiled to Elba, nor did he ever learn more than rudimentary English. Although he would repeatedly plead with his wife to join him, he was not a faithful husband, and Stroud narrates his affairs with an American and a Frenchwoman, both of whom bore him children. Yet he continued to feel the separation from his two legitimate daughters keenly and never stopped plotting to ensure the dynastic survival of the Bonapartes.
In the end, the man who had been king returned to Europe, where he was eventually interred next to the tomb of his brother in Les Invalides. But the legacy of Joseph Bonaparte in America remains, and it is this that Patricia Tyson Stroud has masterfully uncovered in a book that is sure to appeal to lovers of art and gardens and European and American history.
Customer Reviews:
A Great Read about a Fascinating Man.......2005-07-25
This is a first-rate biography that is an excellent follow-on to Stroud's book about Napoleon's nephew, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte (The Emperor of Nature). Stroud has been a biographer of natural historians (another was of Thomas Say, the first American naturalist), but this sojourn into the American exile of Napoleon's older brother Joseph, an aristocrat and former king of Naples and Spain, proves a good fit for her.
One suspects Stroud was drawn to Joseph's story in part because he made his large estate in southern New Jersey into a vast private nature reserve, in which he enriched the natural stock by introducing species from his much-missed Europe, including hares and Osage orange trees. Stroud throws in amusing
anecdotes about encounters with wildlife: Charles-Lucien, newly arrived from Italy, once gleefully leaps off his horse to grab a beautiful black-and-white creature scurrying along the ground -- only to get sprayed by a skunk.
But Stroud doesn't dwell on the natural history but rather on the rich aristocratic life of Joseph in America, who built one of the country's finest art collections at the time. Stroud makes it clear that the degree to which Joseph influenced the advancement of high European culture in this country, which today reveals itself in great private and public art and library collections, magnificent gardens, and grand estates, was significant. His library, for one, had more volumes than the Library of Congress.
Joseph, a sensitive sophisticate who seems to be the polar opposite of his willful, deeply egotistical younger brother, comes across as a highly likable fellow who is at once an expatriate playboy and a partisan utterly committed to restoring a Bonaparte to the throne of France. His exile in America, which lasts 17 years, makes for a good story, and Stroud tells it with verve, intelligence, and an easygoing yet authoritative style that should appeal to both lay and scholarly readers. I particularly enjoyed her sense of humor: there's one scene of Joseph confronting Napoleon in the bathtub about the Louisiana Purchase that should not be missed.
Average customer rating:
- Great trip, great read.
- A modern family's journey to retrace Marco Polo's route
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Retracing Marco Polo: A Tale Of Modern Travelers Who Locate And Follow Marco Polo's Route To China And Burma
jack, jr. Spain
Manufacturer: Gilgit Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0974628328 |
Customer Reviews:
Great trip, great read........2004-11-25
This is a delightful and charming book. Shortly after starting it the reader will feel that he/she is part of this clever, adventurous and personable family and will learn a lot along the route. I highly recommend this book to you and to any one to whom you want to give a good book.
A modern family's journey to retrace Marco Polo's route.......2004-10-30
Retracing Marco Polo is the travelogue of a modern family's journey to retrace Marco Polo's route to China. Comparing older texts and modern maps to plot a course, then following a winding route through Venice, Jerusalem, Turkey, and China (the trail through current-day Iran and Afghanistan was closed to them, so they went through Pakistan instead), they took in the sights, scenery, and experiences of pure adventure. Inset sections of color photograph plates illustrate this enjoyable narrative of setting out to walk in the footsteps of greatness.
Book Description
New in the Peace Hill Press series on neglected historical figures.
Discover the intriguing story of Amerigo Vespucci in this entry in the innovative junior-level biography series. Vespucci's accomplishments included discovering new lands for Spain and Portugal, but they are often eclipsed by those of his famous contemporary Christopher Columbus. Delightful and ingenious illustrations by Jed Mickle help complement the narrative.
Book Description
In The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi, Mark Kurlansky exhibits his great affection for two rocky coastlines facing each other, Massachusetts on one side of the Atlantic and Euskadi (Basqueland) on the other. In his book The Basque History of the World, Kurlansky wrote, "The Basques seem to be a mythical people, almost an imagined people." In this children's tale, a small girl who, while practicing her swimming in Gloucester, Massachusetts, accidentally swims to Euskadi and finds a strange land of strange customs and remarkable beauty. Returning home, no one will believe her that such a place exists.
The Girl Who Swam to Euskadi is a bilingual book in English and Euskera, the ancient Basque language, which is the oldest living European language.
All proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to the New York Basque Cultural Center.
Customer Reviews:
Fascinating insight into the foundation of modern California.......2004-07-03
San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Jose, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Diego - some of the string of pearls along the length of California.
The book uncovers the work of those few hardy souls who founded those communities in the seventeen-hundreds. Their development model was radically different from the US mainstream: that the land belonged to the Native Americans, and that the missions were to mentor those who volunteered in their transition from the hunter-gatherer/horticulturalist to the agriculturalist strategy.
Already then we see the clash between Serra and the naive Europeans who wanted to rush to impose a European-model urban-based governance system, regardless of the vulnerability of Native-American culture to urban European abuses, and how he held them off for a generation.
And we also see the human dimension: how every great person is in the end a bundle of strengths and weaknesses, and how a person that felt ordinary in himself performs historic achievements. This account is both humbling and empowering.
A clear and fascinating account of Junipero Serra, key person in one of the greatest and most influential states of today's world.
Book Description
A marvelous rediscovery: the compelling story of the strange and noble life—and dream—of nineteenth-century utopian social revolutionary and self-taught engineer Narcís Monturiol, who invented the world’s first fully operational steam-powered submarine, not as a weapon of war but as a means of saving human life and spreading democracy.
Matthew Stewart tells the story of Monturiol from his childhood to his years living the dangerous life of a revolutionary. We see him at the bloody barricades and fleeing—one step ahead of the Barcelona police—to the remote coastline of northern Catalonia. On that shore, watching teams of divers risk their lives gathering coral from the water’s depths for use in the making of jewels, candelabras, and crimson pigment, he finds the true purpose of his life. He saves a man presumed dead from drowning and conceives of a craft that will protect the divers who harvest coral—a safe, hermetically sealed underwater vessel that will make the ocean’s bounty available to the common man.
Stewart writes about the building of Monturiol’s submarine: how, without scientific education (he was a lawyer by training), Monturiol read books on physics, chemistry, and biology; how he launched a hand-powered prototype submarine capable of reaching depths of sixty feet; how his efforts to gain government support for building a larger submarine were thwarted (his invention was dismissed by one official as having “no useful applications”). We see Monturiol, unwilling to give up on his dream, turn to the artists, poets, and musicians of Barcelona to help him mobilize the public to fund his project, and how he launched his second, much larger vessel five years later: the most advanced submarine of its day; at more than fifty feet long it displaced seventy-two tons and navigated reliably at depths of up to one hundred feet, with a unique system for eliminating carbon dioxide, replenishing oxygen in the interior cabin, and enabling its crew to remain underwater indefinitely. It had a steam engine for propulsion, a chemical furnace to heat the engine as it generated oxygen for the crew, external lights, portholes, and pincers for harvesting coral and other objects from the deep. It was the first true submarine; the world would not see its equal for another twenty years.
And we watch as Monturiol’s revolutionary friends, making use of his utopian ideals and notions of urban planning (a term he originated), forge a new culture for Catalonia and its capital city and create the radical design that resulted in an entirely new Barcelona.
Customer Reviews:
The Don Quixote of submarines.......2005-09-02
I'm Irish and live for some years now in Berlin. On a recent trip to Ireland, I came upon this book in a bookshop. I enjoyed reading it so much, I ordered a copy of it through Amazon to be sent to my eldest son who lives in the USA - I wanted him to read it, but I didn't want to give away my copy.
This is a great story. I always enjoy a well written history book, particularly because a good one can take a potentially boring subject (history!) and bring it to life. Monturiol is the Don Quixote of submarines, and I really felt for him and his band of dreamers as he followed the call of his quest.
Next step for me is a plan to some day go to Barcelona and see the remains and replica of his submarine.
There is a quote I heard somewhere; 'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for'. So is it with Monturiol. But in writing this book, Matthew Stewart never fails his reader.
Read the book and enjoy.
A Forgotten Submariner.......2004-08-19
Narcís Monturiol dreamed of bringing peace and democracy to the whole world. He did not just dream, but he acted. He was an inventor, and he meant for his great invention to become the revolutionary spark to bring humankind into the rosy and egalitarian future. His invention: the most advanced and only reliable submarine of his time, the mid-nineteenth century. In _Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World_ (Pantheon), Matthew Stewart has written an entertaining biography of the forgotten submariner, whose name is absent even from many histories of the submarine. There are many contingencies that conspired to keep him an unknown, and many tiny events that could have gone differently so that his invention would have descendants and we would know him as "The Father of the Modern Submarine." As it turned out, he was one of those inventors that didn't get the recognition he deserved, and his life only seems successful in retrospect. Nonetheless, he was a fabulous dreamer, thinker, and tinkerer, and deserves the rescue from oblivion provided by this volume.
Monturiol, born in 1819, was a surprise entry into the submarine inventing game. By 1856, he was "pretty much your typical utopian socialist revolutionary." He was not an engineer. He had much to learn, teaching himself the chemistry by which he could produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the air. He developed thick glass for portholes, and once he realized how dark it was down there, he developed an external lighting system that worked just fine. He was the first to insist on double hulling for a sub; the external one protected the craft and gave it a hydrodynamic shape (these were good-looking, streamlined vessels that resembled giant fish), while the inner one had the safety sealing to protect the crew. It could dive to 20 meters, although with his perfectionism for safety, he made the craft far more pressure-resistant than that. It was steerable, and was propelled by its crew of sixteen cranking a shaft connected to a propeller. The propulsion system was not up to Monturiol's standards, as it could not reach what he thought was an acceptable minimum speed of three knots. When he realized this, he looked for another way of powering the ship; electrical motors (which would be used on the first military subs of the twentieth century) were not yet feasible, and steam had the hazard of fire within the confines of the vessel. Monturiol performed thousands of experiments to find a heat-producing chemical reaction that would generate steam and also produce oxygen as a useful waste product.
It was a brilliant solution that never got a good try. Monturiol, never a good business planner, eventually had no funds for further prototypes. He had spent years of trying, and had sacrificed parts of his utopian dream to bring his machine into reality: a pacifist, he had tried to get military support; a communist, he had tried for capitalistic backing; an internationalist, he had tried to mine local Catalan enthusiasm. It did no good in the end, as eventually _Ictineo II_ went for scrap, breaking the inventor's heart. He scraped by for himself and his family by taking hack writing jobs and then a job in a brokerage house, eventually working his way up to being a cashier. He continued to invent; one of his later inventions, a method of preserving meat for export, ought to have made him millions, but it only made millions for the man who stole it from him. When submarines became practical in the next century, engineers had to re-learn many of the ideas Monturiol had pioneered, so his actual influence was slight. Nonetheless, after a century of neglect, Barcelona has a street sculpture of his sub, and a life-size mock-up to show just what the graceful craft looked like, and a street named after the inventor. Now with this admiring and well-illustrated biography, Monturiol further takes his belated but rightful place within the ranks of those who developed the submarine.
Average customer rating:
- Spain's First Bourbon
- A new biography for a neglected king
- Was the King Crazy?
- A Royal Manic Depressive
- REhabilitating a "sick" king
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Philip V of Spain: The King Who Reigned Twice
Henry Kamen
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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The Duke of Alba
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Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763
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Louis XIII, the Just
ASIN: 0300087187 |
Book Description
Philip V, who reluctantly assumed the Spanish throne in 1700, was the first of the Bourbon dynasty which continues to reign today. Philip's forty-six-year reign, briefly curtailed in 1724 when he abdicated in favor of his short-lived son, Louis I, was one of the most important in the country's history. This highly readable account is the first biography of Philip V in English.
Previous writing on Philip has been largely negative, dismissing him as comic, stupid, and indolent. Henry Kamen demonstrates here, however, that the king initiated significant developments in politics, imperial policy, finance, government, and the army that laid the basis of the modern Spanish state. Philip also encouraged literature, the creative arts, and music in ways that brought Spanish culture closer in touch with Europe, and he dealt authoritatively with issues concerning the autonomy of the provinces of Spain and the role of the monarchy itself. Drawing on both contemporary sources and fresh archival sources, Kamen discusses Philip's character, decisions, and policies. Kamen's account of Philip as king provides an essential introduction to the study of early eighteenth-century Spain and the Bourbon monarchy.
Customer Reviews:
Spain's First Bourbon.......2002-10-28
Kamen's biography of Philip V, which is the first English-language biography on this troubled soul for a long time, is an attempt at rehabilitation. In Philip's case, rehabilitation has its limits - for instance, the fact that he attended FEWER auto-da-fe's than his Hapsburg predecessors is hardly exculpatory. On the other hand, Kamen shows that Philip was a diligent man who, from the moment he arrived from Paris (he was French-born and indeed a grandson of Louis XIV), took his constitutional and religious roles extremely seriously, and withstood armed insurrection by the Hapsburg pretender, Archduke (later Emperor) Charles. Kamen also refutes the standard caricature of Philip as "dominated by women" and "tormented by desire for his wife." (He was uxorious! So what?) As to Philip's supposed "feeble-mindedness" and "madness," Kamen has the benefit of modern psychiatry, and as he explains, Philip's extravagant mood swings and melancholia are classic symptoms of manic depression. Finally, the title: he ruled "twice" not because of his supposed "madness," but because he abdicated in favor of his first-born son Louis, who then died only months later, leaving Philip to re-take the reins of power. A scholarly and impressive study of Spanish court life in the early eighteenth century.
A new biography for a neglected king.......2002-05-21
Philip V is a king who is more often talked about than subjected to scholarly inquiry. His role in the war of Spanish Succession and his subsequent career on the throne and his second marriage have been the subject of numerous rumors and speculation. Henry Kamen's book rights a great wrong and restores Philip to the modern reader by subjecting his career and mental history to a modern sensibility. Philip's probable bi-polar disorder expalins a great deal about Philip's behavior Kamen's book is not only useful to the reader interested in Spain, but in 17th century European history in general.
Was the King Crazy?.......2002-02-23
Was the King Crazy?
Mr. Kamen's book is not really a biography of the Spanish king. Rather, it is a diatribe against other historians who described Philip V as weak, mentally disturbed and a disaster for this country. The author does not see it that way.
Mr. Kamen explains that Philip suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder. Could that be another expression for mentally unfit? While the king spent days and weeks in bed, screaming loud and messing up himself and his surroundings, the author claims that he was still of a composed mind and absolutely lucid. Philip's second wife, Elizabeth Farnese, took over the command of the kingdom, saying that she only acted on the instructions of her husband. Do we want to believe her? What we can believe is that, during Philip?s first marriage to Marie Louise of Savoy and even beyond, the affairs of Spain were run by the king's grandfather, King Louis XIV of France. Under Elizabeth Farnese, the French influence lessened and was supplanted by an Italian hegemony.
Given this very strong foreign influence, and the considerable power still exercised by the Spanish grandees, one could question whether or not it really mattered that much if Philip was always lucid or bipolar. Mr. Kamen may have lost the basis for his argument.
A Royal Manic Depressive.......2001-11-21
As a history of the founding of the Boubon dynasty in Spain, I like this book. It's informative about the blood relationships of contenders for the crowns of Aragon and Castille a little more than a century after the Moors were defeated by Ferdinand and Isabella. The author describes the effect of Phillip's mental illness on political power, on family relationships, and on the formation of a centralized, Spanish administration. This is not a thriller of a book, but it teaches details one never hears about in school, for instance, about the role of marriages on treaties, territorial sovereignty and national identity, or about local versus centralized taxation to support royalty and nobility. It's a good thing that Phillip married strong, politically savvy and devoted women both times.
REhabilitating a "sick" king.......2001-10-16
Kamen makes a fruitless attempt to "rehabilitate" the first Bourbon king of Spain, known as Philip V.
No matter how he might try, the author offers very little that could convince a reader that this man contributed anything of value that would obliterate the sorry record of achievements of the very wealthy nation over which he ruled.
Kamen tries to generate sympathy for this man by appealing to current psychiatric babble -- claiming that he suffered from "bipolar disorder." One might generate sympathy for anyone who developed the disordered psychological system that Philip had developed, if he were to be regarded simply as a human being. How can a modern author ignore the tremendous suffering and disorder that resulted from a society being convinced that such a man should rule over a vast empire? The contents of this book does demonstrate the kind of folly into which masses of people can be led by being induced to uphold the kind of reality that allowed a man like Philip to act as a figurehead for a nation that controlled vast wealth and resources.
Kamen, however, conveniently gives little attention to the tremendous suffering of the general public which resulted from a system which allowed a man who worked from a most unusual psycholgical system to remain as a figurehead of power for a nation that controlled vast wealth. Instead, he tries to insert -- between the descriptions of Philip's blatantly unsual pychological functioning -- tidbits which are supposed to generate sympathy and to convince the reader that this man actually accomplished useful functions during his long tenure as king of Spain -- 1700-1746.
This book might have been useful as a clear cut example of how a nation's citizenry can be led to engage in extremely unproductive and, ultimately, dangerous activity if they are first convinced to accept a set of basic constructions -- "the divine right of kings," "the power of the market place," etc. This man served as the figurehead for a power structure that steered Europe -- and The Western Hemisphere -- through vastly significant events. Though a historian can hold to the premise that he/she should not engage in "what if" writing, he/she can -- I would claim -- point out how people of a particular era had been "trapped" in their constructions.
Average customer rating:
- Satisfying blend of Peninsular War/waterloo history and code breaking
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The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes
Mark Urban
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0571205380 |
Customer Reviews:
Satisfying blend of Peninsular War/waterloo history and code breaking.......2005-09-06
New insight into the Peninsular war with Mark Urban's book. This is very much about the code breaking and spying which was part of the intelligence gathering of Wellington's army and how it became an 'industry' in itself.
This is all pre-Playfair and his more complex codes which started about a decade later (Simon Singh;s book "The Code book" is an excellent parallel read to this) and so the simpler codes, what they were and how they were broken are covered = and how it developed and with it the role of one man, George Scovell.
I found this readable, but not a page turner, my interest in the Peninsular war kept me going. I felt that Urban got bogged down, especially at the beginning with setting the scene of the Peninsular War and its earlier battles. I didn't find the level of detail relevant to the story although for those not clear on the Peninsular war and its progress the detail might prove more interesting.
What I really enjoyed was Urban's sharp incisive analysis of the development of the intelligence gathering and how Scovell's role as a professional in the task came about. Urban's knowledge of processes and functioning of the army and most particularly Wellington's operations and officers provides a level of background which makes this book readable by anyone interest in early codes as well as military history.
I really enjoyed this but I felt that it needed a bit more editing at the start. Still it flowed well, Urban is an excellent writer, and it is a fascinating read. Overall it is a Highly recommended history
A Woodley
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