Is Paris Burning?

This is a superb history of the liberation of Berlin in August of 1944, with the American forces joining with the Free French forces under DeGaulle converging on Paris. What I learned that astounded me was that Hitler had ordered the total destruction of the city if the Germans could not hold it. So Germans placed explosives under every bridge crossing the Seine and inside most of the great monuments. However, the German general in charge dithered and never gave the order in time to obliterate the city.This book is a great read in the vein of more or less popular history, and by popular I do not mean inaccurate. I recommend it highly.

Everyone should read this significant historical book. Book was exactly as described and was shipped promptly.

A fascinating fictionalised history: a collection of accounts of the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in 1944. Collins and Lapierre manage to string together a range of different narrative foci, using a kind of ficitonalised interior position in conjunction with documented history of the time. There are certain moments of privlege, and certain moments of exclusion, but a gripping and often touching read is the end result. You get the 'high end' of the story, with de Gaulle and Patton etc, but also many ordinary anecdotal stories, which are often the most interesting, and devastating. Many of the internal conflicts within the allied forces are laid bare for those that thought this was purely a 'them and us' kind of thing.

Read it last summer before going to Paris, and it greatly enhanced the trip. WWII history in Paris is not easy to find. Book is well researched and written covering the German occupation of Paris from August 1940 to the liberation in August 1944. The politics of the liberation is fascinating and the pictures wonderful.

Good historical read, written easy enough to process.

So well researched and far better than the film. A good review of the city after the fire at Norte Dame

This is a classic by the Lapierre and Collins team. Along with O' Jerusalem and Freedom at Midnight, the three books are of considerable importance in understanding the background to three key events in world History. The language is non-academic and the presentation follows a frame work of a fiction.

As I am slowly adding hardback books to my personal library I was very happy to find "Is Paris Burning?" here at Amazon. It is well written and as the reviews often say......gripping.