Preview edition of my new historical novel

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A brave war   ...   a failed peace

Two American veterans of the 1918 battle at Chateau Thierry meet in Paris in 1928. Kurt, now a Berlin correspondent, is writing the great American novel about the grinding end to the war, the desolation of the peace in Germany, and a doomed romance with a German nurse. Bill, a literary agent living on Ile St.-Louis in Paris, plans to publish the novel at the same time as Hemingway’s war novel debuts. Left Bank writer Kate edits the novel, quietly remembering her own long-lost love affair in the war. Cameos of Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Natalie Barney, John Maynard Keynes. 

BOOK REVIEW 

The Paris Correspondent

The chase for truth—expensive—in a world of commodity journalism—cheap 

by Paul A. Myers

Alan Cowell has crafted a black humor classic about the epic world of war correspondents reporting the truth of hard facts annealed in the heat of modern war. The reporting of hard facts is done inside a larger media world of internet journalism defined by the economics of cheap megabytes floating on a sea of internet lies and celebrity pretension.

The story is about Joe Shelby, a legendary war correspondent from Vietnam on, finishing out his career as an internet rewrite guy in Paris, and his epic love for the fearless combat photographer Faria Duclos. Their story is defined by many shared dangers and many infidelities to a great love that was not a relationship but something else. The narrator is Shelby’s less colorful, more sane, editorial sidekick, who becomes part of the larger narrative as whatever truths that need telling get told as a career winds down and important things get said.

Halfway through the novel I read the fascinating account of the life and death of London Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin in February 2012 in Syria in the August 2012 issue of Vanity Fair. Colvin’s is the true story of Faria Duclos and Joe Shelby rolled into one talented, yet very broken, true character, a reporter caught in the “addiction to the poison elixir of battle.” Her last assignment in Syria was described by her cameraman, “Of all the trips we had done together, this one was complete insanity.” What is the motivation here? The article stresses Colvin’s deep commitment to reporting the truth.

That also turns out to be the central motivation ascribed to war correspondents in The Paris Correspondent, the central talisman of their nomadic existence. But what is the truth here? The war correspondents are not sending back well-articulated critiques of the wars they are covering. Other people, more comfortably perched, write the analyses, weigh it in the scales of “good” policy or “bad” policy. The war correspondents send back the jarring, blood-soaked facts of human conflict that upturn the bureaucratic narrative, the thought-out assumptions. Characteristic of Colvin was getting out to the world images of the death of a young Palestinian woman in Lebanon, ambushed by Shiite militia snipers, as she lay by a burned-out car, blood pouring out of her and “the handful of blood-soaked dirt she had clenched in her pain.”

Simply put, The Paris Correspondent is the backstory to the life of Marie Colvin. The one resonates with the other in an almost perfect harmony between art and reality.

But another terrible fact is brought home to us in both the real-life story of Marie Colvin and the novel: men like Bashir Assad massacre women and children, with premeditation and no remorse, because the ugliest dimensions of brutality are effective tools of intimidation; brutality works because it is so ugly.

This streaming of hard-gained, painful facts from the world’s war zones to the world public is something that can’t be outsourced to bloggers. Only so much can be conveyed by youtube uploads. The public senses that only the real thing will do.

Cowel captures the backstory, the panache of the era, in his main character Joe Shelby, the archetypical war correspondent. The arc of experience from Vietnam through all the world’s troubled spots up to the mini-Stalingrads in today’s Syria is captured in the emotional narrative. There is also a thriller-type, who-dunnit story stuck in the novel to be “plot.” Compared to the true story of Marie Colvin, the thriller plot is a weak construct. A fascinating aside is that the bad guy is a journalist whose style is to be something of an aggregator, a purveyor of other people’s reporting.

But the charismatic Joe Shelby carries the book to a tender and satisfying, if somewhat surprising, ending.

Posted on Amazon August 24, 2012

Van Gogh Museum

Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. My wife Minche and I visited the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It is one of the finest museums dedicated to the work of one artist that I have seen. Approximately 200 of his paintings and a vast collection of letters and some drawings are in the museum. You follow his at once fabulous and tortured life story from beginning to tragic end.

There are a lot of paintings that I saw that I appreciated more than his most famous ones, which are featured in every art history book. The above painting "Landscape at Twilight 1890" is one of the most remarkable and beautiful paintings I have ever seen -- but you really need to see it in person and from about 10 to 20 feet away. It is at a distance that Van Gogh's colorful technique has its greatest impact; standing right in front of the painting doesn't do it.

In addition to the Van Goghs, there is a nice small collection of art from his contemporaries from the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Van Gogh is a guy who has put Rembrandt and the other high Dutch Renaissance painters in the shade, whose art is at the Rijksmuseum about 300 meters away. A very impressive performance.

Jazz Soprano at Paris

Jessye Norman at the Olympia in Paris June 2012. My wife and I saw jazz soprano Jessye Norman sing the jazz and supper club standards at the great Paris music hall, the Olympia, on a Tuesday night in June on our Paris trip. These were standards from the Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and other American greats. Plus the Josephine Baker classic, "Deux Amours." (Two Loves). I thought her rendition of the Ellington classic "Stormy Weather" was one of the best I ever heard.

Very memorable to sit in this music auditorium where Edith Piaf gave her last concert and where Mireille Mathieu and other greats gave such magnificent performances. It is to sit and listen to the melody of Paris float by.

Ebook - Monaco, Onassis and Prince Rainier

French Sketches:  Monaco, Onassis, and Prince Rainier

This French Sketch is up and available at Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iPad, Smashwords and other ebook retailers for $.99. This is the third in the series.

In 1950, twenty-seven-year-old Prince Rainier succeeded his grandfather as sovereign prince of the little principality of Monaco on the French Riviera. The city-state’s principal attractions were the renowned casino at Monte Carlo and the beautiful belle époque Hotel de Paris. Unfortunately, the Russian nobility and English aristocrats who had lost fortunes at the casino were long gone. Into these impecunious circumstances sailed international tanker tycoon Aristotle Onassis who bought majority control of SBM, the holding company that owned the casino and hotel.

Onassis had new money and old ideas about how to make Monaco prosperous again. He wanted to cater to a small audience of the very wealthy. In contrast, Prince Rainier wanted to develop a modern and larger market of well-to-do tax exiles, high income people attracted to favorable tax rates and beautiful Riviera weather. A power struggle between the two visions evolved over the next fifteen years until in the mid-1960s Rainier vanquished Onassis with the help of Charles de Gaulle, president of France.

Along the way Rainier married movie star Grace Kelly in the greatest fairytale wedding of the twentieth century. In a more roguish manner, Onassis embarked on high profile affairs with opera diva Maria Callas, Lee Radziwill, and Jackie Kennedy, often using his luxurious yacht Christina O as a floating rendezvous for assignation, a perfect symbol for the lust, greed, and status seeking behind these tabloid romances.

Free ebook code GR83U at Smashwords thru Jul 10

Free Ebook code GR83U good at Smashwords through July 10, 2012 for my book.

"Paris 1935" free ebook code at Smashwords

Purchase "Paris 1935" for free with 100 percent off coupon cod DP87K at Smashwords in any desired ebook format. Code is good through July 10, 2012.