France Books

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

Tilar J. Mazzeo

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Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, October 2008: With its trademark fizz and sparkling taste, champagne has long been the beverage of choice for those in a celebratory mood. From the artillery of popping corks on New Year's Eve to the clinking of newlywed glasses, a bit of the bubbly has locked arms with good cheer for centuries. Yet had it not been for the pioneering Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, the libation deemed "the wine of civilization" by Winston Churchill might today be available only to the excessively wealthy or extremely lucky. Author Tilar J. Mazzeo toasts the élan of Champagne's Grand Dame with The Widow Clicquot, a fascinating story of the cunning bravery and good fortune that helped build the Veuve Clicquot brand. Widowed at age twenty-seven by the death of her husband François Clicquot, Barbe-Nicole assumed control of her family’s wine business amid the chaos of The Napoleonic Wars. That she became a prominent female leader in a male-dominated industry was one thing; building an empire amid savage political unrest was quite another. With passionate research and true admiration for her subject, Mazzeo pays homage to the beloved Widow from Reims and the remarkable weight her name still carries today. -Dave Callanan

The Discovery of France

Graham Robb

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A witty, engaging narrative style....[Robb's] approach is particularly engrossing."—New York Times Book Review, front-page review

A narrative of exploration—full of strange landscapes and even stranger inhabitants—that explains the enduring fascination of France. While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.

Graham Robb describes that unknown world in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages.

The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today. Above all, it shows how much of France—past and present—remains to be discovered. A New York Times Notable Book, Publishers Weekly Best Book, Slate Best Book, and Booklist Editor's Choice. 16 pages of illustrations.

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme

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Total reviews: 119 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.


Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story – struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe – unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

Napoleon in Egypt

Paul Strathern

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Subjects -> History -> Middle East -> Egypt

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Europe is a molehill….”
Everything here is worn out…tiny Europe has not enough to offer.
We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved.” —Napoleon


Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was the first Western attack in modern times on a Middle Eastern country. In this remarkably rich and eminently readable historical account, acclaimed author Paul Strathern reconstructs a mission of conquest inspired by glory, executed in haste, and bound for disaster.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, only twenty-eight, mounted the most audacious military campaign of his already spectacular career. With 335 ships, 40,000 soldiers, and a collection of scholars, artists, scientists, and inventors, he set sail for Egypt to establish an Eastern empire in emulation of Alexander the Great. Like everything Napoleon ever attempted, it was a plan marked by unquenchable ambition, heroic romanticism, and not a little madness.

Napoleon saw himself as a liberator, freeing the Egyptians from the oppression of their Mameluke overlords. But while Napoleon thought his army would be welcomed as heroes, he tragically misunderstood Muslim culture and grossly overestimated the “gratitude” he could expect from those he’d come to save. Instead Napoleon and his men would face a grim war of attrition against an ad hoc army of Muslims led by the feared Murad Bey. Marching across seemingly endless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids, suffering extremes of heat and thirst, and pushed to the limits of human endurance, they would be plagued by mirages, suicides, and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor and intended for glory would degenerate toward chaos and atrocity.

But Napoleon’s grand failure in Egypt also yielded vast treasures of knowledge about a culture largely lost to the West, and through the recovery of artifacts like the Rosetta Stone, it prepared the way for the translation of hieroglyphics and modern Egyptology. And it tempered the complex leader who believed it his destiny to conquer the world.

A story of war, adventure, politics, and a clash of cultures, Paul Strathern’s Napoleon in Egypt is history at once relevant and impossible to put down.

The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern

Keith Devlin

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Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Mathematics -> Applied -> Statistics

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Before the mid-seventeenth century, scholars generally agreed that it was impossible to predict something by calculating mathematical outcomes. One simply could not put a numerical value on the likelihood that a particular event would occur. Even the outcome of something as simple as a dice roll or the likelihood of showers instead of sunshine was thought to lie in the realm of pure, unknowable chance.

The issue remained intractable until Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre de Fermat in 1654, outlining a solution to the “unfinished game” problem: how do you divide the pot when players are forced to end a game of dice before someone has won? The idea turned out to be far more seminal than Pascal realized. From it, the two men developed the method known today as probability theory.

In The Unfinished Game, mathematician and NPR commentator Keith Devlin tells the story of this correspondence and its remarkable impact on the modern world: from insurance rates, to housing and job markets, to the safety of cars and planes, calculating probabilities allowed people, for the first time, to think rationally about how future events might unfold.

Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles

Christian Duvernois

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

VERSAILLES THROUGH MARIE-ANTIONETTE 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Marie-Antoinette is something of an enigma, some feel she is the misunderstood tragic heroine of the Ancient Regime and some feel she is that Austria wh*re, who may or my not have said, let them eat cake, and spent France into Revolution, I feel she is probably all of this and more. One thing is for certain, she held herself and her family in honor as she took the guillotine, she died with grace befiting her stature, even if those around her threw things at her and called her unspeakable things. As for this book, it is very good, the images are well presented, some in black and white, others in color, and the text is informative without being too dry or scholarly. I appreciated the attention to such buildings as the glorious Belvedere and the gorgeous Pavillion, these two esquisite small buildings often get lost in the spendor that is Versailles, but they are actually two of the most beautiful stuctures on the Palace grounds. A few buildings such as the Petit Palais get sort of short shrift, but they have been covered extensively in other books and really are more thought of in the context of Louis XV and Pompadour. Overall, a good book that covers some new ground, fine images and interesting text make it a fitting homage to Antoinette and her small sanctuary at Versailles.

Editorial Review:

Marie-Antoinette has been idolized as the height of eighteenth-century French style and vilified as the spark that ignited the French Revolution. This book departs from such traditional interpretations of the infamous queen’s reign and chooses to reflect on the humanistic aspects of her private realm. To escape the formalities and royal obligations of Louis XVI’s court, Marie-Antoinette created a private realm of pleasure for herself at the Petit Trianon and Hameau, where she planted the first Anglo-Chinese garden; created a trysting grotto; a working farm; and revolutionized architecture and gardening trends for the century to come. Marie-Antoinette’s entire private domain and its story are told in beautiful photographic detail by François Halard for the first time since its recent restoration and accompanied by well-researched texts by garden expert Christian Duvernois.

Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

Donald Kladstrup, Petie Kladstrup

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Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Liberty, equality, and fraternity are all well and good, a champion of French culture once remarked. But, he continued, what made France truly superior to its neighbors was the French passion for wine, which "contributed to the French race by giving it wit, gaiety, and good taste, qualities which set it profoundly apart from people who drink a lot of beer."

The commentator may have had a point; after all, write Don and Petie Kladstrup, it was a well-known fact that Adolf Hitler did not like wine. Still, their leader's teetotalism notwithstanding, the Germans showed no distaste for French wine when they invaded France in 1940. Indeed, among the first acts of the occupying army was to seize great stores of wine, sending tens of thousands of barrels to the Third Reich and ordering the conversion of thousands of hectares of vineyards into war production.

Some French vintners, the Kladstrups write in this enjoyable study, went along with orders. Many others, however, including the heads of distinguished houses like Moët et Chandon, engaged in daring and dangerous acts of resistance wherever they could. Some lied about their yields; others built false walls to hide precious vintages; and still others concocted elaborate ruses, such as sprinkling carpet dust into inferior grades of new wine to give it a musty, distinguished flavor. Not every German was fooled, and some partisans of the grape died for their troubles. But some Germans, at considerable risk to themselves, also looked the other way. The Kladstrups fill their pages with memories of the wine war from both sides of the struggle, stories sometimes somber, sometimes amusing, that commemorate those "whose love of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in French history." --Gregory McNamee

Provence A-Z: A Francophile's Essential Handbook (Vintage Departures)

Peter Mayle

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A 'Dictionary' Full of Love 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Here's a book of a couple of hundred entries, from A to Z of course, about life in the Provence region of France. Each entry then has from a short paragraph to a few pages of description. The author is Peter Mayle who has almost made a careet of writing about Provence. He's a Brit who moved there many years ago. He was going there to write a novel, but instead wrote a book on Provence which to the surprise of many turned into a best seller.

This started a trend with 'A Year in Provence' and 'Toujours Provence' being the best known. Like expats everywhere who have permanently moved from their homeland, Mr. Mayle is in love with his new chosen country. It shows through his selection of words to include in the book and in the dedication with which he has given these words their Provence meaning.

It's almost enough to make people who don't like France ready to go visit.

Editorial Review:

The ultimate “dictionary” for lovers of Provence: Peter Mayle's personal selection of the foods, customs and words he finds most fascinating, curious, delicious, or just plain fun.

Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. In more than 170 entries, Peter Mayle—bestselling author of A Year in Provence—writes about subjects as wide-ranging as architecture and zingue-zingue-zoun (in the local patois, a word meant to describe the sound of a violin). And, of course, he writes about food and drink: vin rosé, truffles, olives, melons, bouillabaisse, the cheese that killed a Roman emperor, even a cure for indigestion.

Provence A-Z is a delight for Peter Mayle's ever-growing audience and the perfect complement to any guidebook on Provence, or, for that matter, France.

Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine

George M. Taber

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Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

"I Was There" Book About The Wine World's Tasting Heard 'Round the World 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

After far too many ghastly vintages from 1963 - 1974, and with the quality of backward French winemaking going unchallenged, the victory of New World California wines over their prestigious French counterparts in 1976 was, in hindsight, no surprise. Yet it was as great a shock to the French wine world as the collapse of the Maginot Line was to the French military establishment in May 1940. Unlike Andre Maginot, who never lived to see the tragic consequences of his and France's folly, French wine's top champions faced choosing between unbearable humiliation or dismissing the results as an aberration.

"Time" journalist George Taber, who had the wine scoop of the century and to his credit knew what to do with it, here returns to his moment in the sun, developing the storyline into a full book. He chronicles the persons who were at the tasting and who were most impacted by the results. Taber reveals their ongoing struggle absorbing the unthinkable, whether for the winning Californians, who at the time made up the new wave within their own industry and were given a grand opportunity; or in the case in France, where no such young wine Turks had credibility, and the fall out from the tasting was an unacknowledged PR nightmare. Unable to accept the cultural implications, many French refused to countenance the results - indeed at the actual tasting one desperate taster tried rewriting votes! To this day there exist Europeans who adamantly look down their - often Gallic - noses at wine from outside Europe. Yet increasingly, along with the tired fruit of those aging Bordeaux wines, such chauvinism more and more fades from respectable wine debate. Winemaking has moved a long way from the crude days of Napoleonic Minister of the Interior Chaptal's policy of using the French sugar beet crop for 'improving' the country's wines.

This book's major focus is humans, not the wines; Taber discusses the repercussions of the tasting far more than the actual event, though the curious secondary stories leading up to the tasting receive the sort of attention usually saved for more serious historical moments. The larger themes - of not resting on your laurels, and the facades that can be the reality of institutional image - emerge with an inexorable - and some might say, overdue - inevitability.

Perhaps it was fated these two birthplaces of democracy, France and America, should be the players in this most democratic-driven event: a blind tasting. (Lady Justice - by contrast - keeps one eye open just to avoid such unacceptabe results, and since the tasting any number of European wine advocates have sympathized and even embraced such a fallback.) Not surprising, too, that the more capitalist country and can-do Americans should triumph over the less egalitarian 'old world' of the more rigid and stratified hierachical universe of French wine estates, with their aristocratic trappings.

Complacency and arrogance are poor resources to contest with - and the French wine world got their ears boxed for just such attitudes. Instead of pulling out all the stops and setting bottles of '59 Lafite or perhaps a '61 Latour-a-Pomerol against the California cabs, or demanding the tasting include pinot noir, which conveniently was omitted because California didn't produce quality pinot noir, the French were snookered into permitting others a say in 'setting the table'. Prejudice and ignorance, kissing cousins of the small-minded and snobbish, got their comeuppance, and the French were hoisted by their own petard. Which in plain language means they foolishly set off the equivalent of a wooden wine crate bursting with gunpowder under their own carefully inscribed world of carefully controlled classes and prices. Generally unfamiliar with blind tasting's pecularities, where fruit and alcohol can trump more subtle qualities, the French tasters naively presumed an expertise they did not possess in comparing varietal wines from differing regions. They were blindsided. Almost none of the tasters had any idea which was domestic wine and which California wine. (Oddly enough, when the tasting was retried ten years later in America, the American tasters could not separate the wines by country.)

Recently the tasting was redone. Once again the French showed they haven't learned very much. French chardonnays, which from great vintages and the best sites can age and develop, were dropped. Once again pinot noir was absent. Chateau Haut-Brion refused to participate, but could not stop the tasting from buying examples of its wine in the marketplace. (Those evil entrepeneurs!) The original losing Bordeaux were trotted out again on the ignorant myth, long disproved by modern enology, that somehow wines with no great fruit when young would suddenly find some after twenty years of aging! The better made and fruitier California wines swept to total victory, sweeping the top placements. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

History was at work here. Yet this sort of challenge was not new for the California winemakers; for many decades avant-garde California wine makers, ambitious to compete with the very best, had been holding such tastings at home, measuring their Chardonnays against Puligny-Montrachets, Chassagne-Montrachets and Meursaults; while judging their best Cabernets against Pauillacs, St.Juliens, and Margaux. In the early seventies the influential English wine writer Harry Waugh, with an impeccable understanding of European wine, published a series of highly impressed tasting notes on these new esoteric California wines he had tasted in travels to California. A small handful of California's newest enologists were experimenting with a variety of new processes, especially in maintaining a wine's fruit. Now obscured, but then still potent icons for young winemakers, were extraordinary wines made by a few legendary wine-makers, such as Andre Tchelistcheff and the extraordinary Martin Ray. (You can read about Ray's colorful career in: Vineyards in the Sky: The Life of Legendary Vintner Martin Ray Those of us who tasted the best wines made by Tcheslistcheff and Ray were perfectly aware of just how good the best California wines could be.

Thus the potential for great wine in California was largely proven long before the '76 tasting - what needed to change was a scaling up so that more great wine could be produced, and this in fact was already well under way. By the the time the French were sitting around dishing the Paris Tasting results California was already bottling the watershed Cabernet vintage of 1974.

Talent's book makes stimulating reading for more than just wine snobs - what's in play here are larger issues, common throughout all levels of society.

Editorial Review:

The Paris Tasting of 1976 will forever be remembered as the landmark event that transformed the wine industry. At this legendary contest -- a blind tasting -- a panel of top French wine experts shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France's best.

George M. Taber, the only reporter present, recounts this seminal contest and its far-reaching effects, focusing on three gifted unknowns behind the winning wines: a college lecturer, a real estate lawyer, and a Yugoslavian immigrant. With unique access to the main players and a contagious passion for his subject, Taber renders this historic event and its tremendous aftershocks -- repositioning the industry and sparking a golden age for viticulture across the globe. With an eclectic cast of characters and magnificent settings, Judgment of Paris is an illuminating tale and a story of the entrepreneurial spirit of the new world conquering the old.

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 133 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all Côtes-du-Rhône and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Provençal domesticity.

Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool--its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.

In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun. --L.A. Smith