Paris on the Brink
The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends
By Mary McAuliffe
Praise for Paris on the Brink
"McAuliffe continues her career-defining cultural survey of Paris as the global depression gives rise to fascism and another world war.... McAuliffe once again, presents a memorable collage of Parisian legends."
- Booklist
"Paris on the Brink vividly evokes the cultural and political life of Paris during the 1930s. The cast of characters...mingle in a bright narrative that wheels from portrait to portrait like a whirligig overshadowed by the lengthening specter of war. McAuliffe has written a truly absorbing book."
- Frederick Brown, author The Embrace of Unreason
"In her enlightening cultural history, McAuliffe details the swirling world of art, fashion, literature, and politics of 1930s Paris. Despite the instability of the decade, which ended with German occupation, Paris remained the center of European cultural creativity, and McAuliffe follows the lives of the city's influential people as they negotiated the decade's shifting political and economic sands. With a breathless pace, McAuliffe's richly detailed history wonderfully captures Paris in the 1930s."
- Publishers Weekly
"Rich and fascinating, this cleverly woven tapestry of stories from the turbulent 1930s shows how the political and artistic worlds of Paris came together in the powerful march of history. Paris on the Brink delivers a genuinely engaging and dramatic account of a profoundly significant era."
- Victoria Best, author An Introduction to Twentieth-Century French Literature
"A breezy, rollicking and vastly entertaining popular history of the international cultural and intellectual life of Paris during the troubled decade just before the Second World War."
- Laird Easton, author The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler