Dateline-Liberated Paris by Ronald Weber

Dateline-Liberated Paris by 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 based in the legendary Hotel Scribe, the maddest place in all the mad city.

When Andy Rooney reminisced about the Hôtel Scribe and the liberation of Paris, a wistful look would come into his eyesHe would deliberately elongate the double “e-e” sound in the French pronunciation of “Scribe,” savoring the memory. And what a memory! Rooney was a young reporter for Stars and Stripes when the Allied press corps descended on the City of Light in late August 1944. Then a teetotaler, Rooney decided to celebrate Paris’s liberation by uncorking a bottle of wine. How many hundreds, nay thousands, of bottles of wine and liquor were uncorked at the Scribe during the late summer and fall of 1944? As Ronald Weber reminds us in his delightful Dateline—Liberated Paris, the great wartime photographer Robert Capa said of those heady days in Paris: ‘Never were there so many who were so happy so early in the morning.’ It wasn’t all toasting and boasting at the Scribe bar. As Weber relates, correspondents were engaged in often-vicious battles for big stories and exclusives. Given primitive means of transmission, there was no guarantee that their bosses would actually see their stories. Rooney’s big exclusive—he was an eyewitness to the 2nd French Armored Division’s leading-edge assault into the capital—never reached his editors at Stars and Stripes. Fortunately, most stories composed in and around the Scribe got through. Even casual WW II buffs will enjoy Weber’s charming account of the tug-of-war between correspondents and Allied military officials played out in ‘a great city where everybody is happy,’ as the New Yorker’s inimitable A. J. Liebling put it. -- Timothy M. Gay, author of the Pulitzer-nominated Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A. J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle
Richly researched and lucidly written, Dateline—Liberated Paris is an important and convincing work that commands the attention of those captivated by one of the momentous events of World War II: Paris’s liberation from Nazi oppression. -- John Romeiser, University of Tennessee Knoxville
A lively account of journalists in Paris after its liberation in World War II and the role of the Hôtel Scribe in bringing them together. Ronald Weber tells fascinating stories about the many legendary journalists who lived and worked at the Scribe under military censorship. -- Julia Kennedy Cochran, author of Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, and the Associated Press

Ronald Weber is professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His books include The Lisbon Route, Hired Pens, Hemingway’s Art ofNonfiction, The Literature of Fact, and News of Paris: American Journalists in the City of Light Between the Wars, which sets the stage for Dateline—Liberated Paris. He has held research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Freedom Forum for Media Studies at Columbia University and has been a Fulbright lecturer in Europe. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781538118504
ISBN 10	1538118505
Title	Dateline-Liberated Paris
Author	Ronald Weber
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Rowman & Littlefield
Year published	2019-04-05
Number of pages	232
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.