Vietnam and beyond

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Edward J. Perkins with Connie Cronley

""Apartheid South Africa was on fire around me." So begins the memoir of Career Foreign Service Officer Edward J. Perkins, the first black United States ambassador to South Africa. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave him the unparalleled assignment: dismantle apartheid without violence. As he fulfilled that assignment, Perkins was scourged by the American press, despised by the Afrikaner government, hissed at by white South African citizens, and initially boycotted by black South African revolutionaries, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His advice to President-elect George H.W. Bush helped modify American policy and hasten the release of Nelson Mandela and others from prison. To achieve this success, he drew on his expertise in conflict resolution, devotion to the U.S. Constitution, deep study of Asian philosophy, and training as a former U.S. marine." "Perkins's up-by-your-bootstraps life took him from a cotton farm in segregated Louisiana to the white elite Foreign Service, where he became the first black officer to ascend to the top position of director general. This is the story of how one man turned the page of history."--Jacket.

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Joe Jackson

This work is an account of the race to cross the Atlantic, and the larger-than-life personalities of the aviators who captured the world's attention In 1919, a prize of $25,000 was offered to the first aviator to cross the Atlantic in either direction between France and America. Although it was one of the most coveted prizes in the world, it sat unclaimed (not without efforts) for eight long years, until the spring of 1927. It was then, during five incredibly tense weeks, that one of those magical windows in history opened, when there occurred a nexus of technology, innovation, character, and spirit that led so many contenders (from different parts of the world) to all suddenly be on the cusp of the exact same achievement at the exact same time. This book is about the race; it is a milestone in American history whose story has never been fully told. Richard Byrd, Noel Davis, Stanton Wooster, Clarence Chamberlin, Charles Levine, Rene Fonck, Charles Nungesser, and François Coli, all had equal weight in the race with Charles Lindbergh. Although the story starts in September 1926 with the crash of the first competitor, or even further back with the 1919 establishment of the prize, its heart is found in a short period, those five weeks from April 14 to May 21, 1927, when the world held its breath and the aviators met their separate fates in the air.

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Gilles Plazy

"Pendant une quarantaine d'années les surréalistes, autour d'André Breton, ont inventé dans Paris une poétique de la ville selon laquelle le rêve transfigure le réel. Ils y ont vécu des aventures surprenantes, dialogué avec des fantômes, suscité des magies nouvelles. Paris fut ainsi pour eux le champ magnétique, érotique, en lequel la poésie se dynamisait du frisson de l'inconnu, de l'inattendu, les invitant sans cesse à prendre le large. Du Panthéon, où naquit le surréalisme, à ta place Blanche où fut le foyer du mouvement, de Montmartre à Montparnasse, de la place Dauphine à la rue La Fayette, de la tour Saint-Jacques à la porte Saint-Denis, dans les rues et les cafés, ils ont célébré l'amour, ta poésie et la liberté."--Page 4 of cover.

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Dan Hofstadter

Hofstadter "shows how these rediscovered documents [forgotten personal writing which has resurfaced in France] bear on the erotic lives of their writers, and how the fine French tradition of conducting love affairs developed as an art form....The romantic trajectory runs from Benjamin Constant and Mme. de Staël to the beautiful Mme. Récamier and her lover Chateaubriand; from George Sand and Alfred de Musset to Mme. de Caillavet and Anatole France; and it concludes with a touching portrait, based partly on still-unpublished sources, of the girl who became the model for Proust's Gilberte."--Jacket.