Paris on the Brink

July 30, 2018
In her enlightening cultural history, McAuliffe (Dawn of the Belle Epoque) details the swirling world of art, fashion, literature, and politics of 1930s Paris. Despite the instability of the decade, which ended with German occupation, Paris remained the center of European cultural creativity, and McAuliffe follows the lives of the city’s influential people as they negotiated the decade’s shifting political and economic sands. In 1929, fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli designed a line of brightly colored clothes, as well as off-the-rack skirts with lower hemlines that would come to define glamour in the decade. A 21-year-old Simone de Beauvoir met and began a relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre just as he was to begin military service. Picasso aligned himself with the Republican cause in Spain, expressing his politics through his art in his painting Guernica, which he unveiled at the 1937 Paris World Fair. By 1939, Jean Renoir had captured the decadence and brutal sadness of the decline of France in his film The Rules of the Game. Meanwhile jazz singer Josephine Baker, living in Paris, helped secure passports for Eastern European Jews seeking refuge in Latin America. With a breathless pace, McAuliffe’s richly detailed history wonderfully captures Paris in the 1930s.

October 1, 2018
The October 1929 Wall Street crash generated economic uncertainty throughout the world. Though France tried to inoculate itself from the impending turmoil, its inhabitants, including those working in the arts while residing in Paris, felt the burden of the global crisis. McAuliffe (When Paris Sizzled, 2016) continues her career-defining cultural survey of Paris as the global depression gives rise to fascism and another world war. The legendary troupe of Paris-based artists and writers celebrated in many a book and movie appears here bearing increasingly heavy burdens as the Roaring Twenties fade to a bleaker era. Hemingway is at odds with Fitzgerald, James Joyce struggles to maintain his lavish lifestyle after publishing Ulysses, Gertrude Stein resents the fame of her contemporaries, and Henry Miller rails against grim times with hedonistic ventures. Add the goings-on of the surrealists Salvador Dal� and Andr� Breton, the bookstore (Shakespeare & Co.) owner Sylvia Beach, architect Le Corbusier, and socialist Leon Blum, among many others, and McAuliffe, once again, presents a memorable collage of Parisian legends.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)