Dateline-Liberated Paris
The Hotel Scribe and the Invasion of the Press
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Dateline-Liberated Paris
Narrated by:
Peter Noble
Buy Now for ₹667.71
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Narrated by:
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Peter Noble
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Written by:
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Ronald Weber
Vividly capturing the heady times in the waning months of World War II, Ronald Weber follows the exploits of Allied reporters as they flooded into liberated Paris after four dark years of Nazi occupation. He traces the remarkable adventures of the men and women who lived, worked, and played in the legendary Hôtel Scribe, set in a highly fashionable part of the largely undamaged city. Press jeeps and trailers packed the street outside, while inside the hotel was completely booked with hundreds of correspondents. The busiest spot was the dining area, where the clatter of typewriters combined with shouts of correspondents needing hot water to brew coffee from military powder. But the basement-level bar was the hotel’s top attraction, where famed war correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite, A. J. Liebling, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, Lee Miller, Marguerite Higgins, Irwin Shaw, Edward Kennedy, Charles Collingwood, Robert Capa, and many others held court while in the company of military censors and top brass. Weber uncovers the struggles between correspondents and Allied officials over censorship and the release of information, the heated press chaos surrounding the war’s end, and the drama of the second German surrender orchestrated by the Russians in shattered Berlin. The elation of total victory was mixed with the abrupt emptiness of a task finished. While work on the Continent remained for journalists, it now dealt with the slog of the occupation of Germany rather than the blood and glory of war. Yet Weber shows there were many reasons to carry on after VE Day in this delightfully entertaining account of the hotel where correspondents were regularly briefed on the war and its aftermath, wrote their stories, had them transmitted to international media outlets, and rarely neglected the pleasures of a Paris reborn until December 1, 1945, when the Hôtel Scribe was officially vacated by the American military.©2019 Ronald Weber (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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Critic Reviews
An inventive take on WWII nonfiction, Ronald Weber’s Dateline—Liberated Paris: The Hotel Scribe and the Invasion of the Press focuses on the Allied reporters who swept through the halls of the famous Hotel Scribe after the liberation of Paris. The Hotel Scribe was a landmark of 1940s Paris, its wooden bar a famous watering hole for war correspondents such as Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite, Marguerite Higgins, and Ernest Hemingway as they battled fitful typewriters and jumped through censorship hoops to send news of the waning war to their respective outlets. The corridors and dining halls of the hotel come alive on the pages, as do the streets of Paris as correspondents stretch their legs along the spared streets, recounting memorable museum visits and encounters with Picasso. VE-Day is portrayed in all its tearful, joyous glory, the streets filling with citizens celebrating the final breath of the war. Brimming with memorable anecdotes, photographs, and newspaper excerpts, Dateline—Liberated Paris is a love letter to the golden age of journalism set in the city of lights
Keen to attach a coveted “Liberated Paris —” dateline to their dispatches, five Canadian newsmen threaded jeeps through French crowds “mad with happiness” on Aug. 24, 1944. Their destination: the fashionable (and aptly named) Hôtel Scribe, the newest Allied press camp on the march from Normandy to Berlin. Though Nazi propaganda officers had abandoned the hotel only earlier in the day, the journalists succeeded in broadcasting word of the city’s impending deliverance from the rooftop that night. As recounted in historian Ronald Weber’s immersive “Dateline — Liberated Paris,” the Canadian reporters were the vanguard of an offbeat invasion force: By two months after D-Day, more than 900 Allied scribes had been accredited to cover the European theater. . . . Short of food, cigarettes, coal and public transport, Paris in the post-liberation period lacked “virtually everything needed for everyday life,” Weber writes. “Yet what it singularly had was itself, the magnificent and largely undamaged city that appealed as much as ever to the Western mind and imagination.”
The book profiles the well-known correspondents, as well as the lessor known. The book also profiles the brave and resourceful women war correspondents, such as Helen Kirkpatrick, Marguerite Higgins, and Ernest Hemingway’ then-wife, Martha Gellhorn, and his future wife, Mary Welch. . . . “Dateline Liberated Paris” is a well-researched book that covers how World War II was covered by the men and women war correspondents.
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