Books by Joseph Kessel
Army of Shadows
by Joseph Kessel
Army of Shadows really takes you to the heart of what it is to be in the Resistance and I think one of the book’s greatest characteristics is that it celebrates the anonymous heroes, the ordinary man or woman who acts as a messenger, carries a suitcase from one town to another... It’s absolutely gripping too. About halfway through the book it stops being a story about the different characters and becomes almost like jottings by the main character, the Resistance leader Philippe Gerbier and you see everything through his eyes. You see the Germans and the Vichy police squeezing the Resistance more and more. You see his world gradually disintegrating; all the people he works with are being arrested, tortured and killed, and he tells it all.
Interviews where books by Joseph Kessel were recommended
The best books on Charles de Gaulle’s Place in French Culture, recommended by Sudhir Hazareesingh
Hazareesingh’s book choices include de Gaulle’s “very readable” war diaries. In books of condolences after the leader’s death, people wrote things like, “Goodbye Charles, you were greater than Napoleon”
