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A Thousand Suns is both a personal memoir and a testament to the notable characters Lapierre met along the way, from the great and the good, such as Mother Teresa, to the infamous (such as Caryl Chessman, who was executed in San Quentin in 1960), to the more anonymous. Throughout, Lapierre is always looking for the personal details that make the stories come alive. And he finds them. He discovers that General von Choltitz, the Nazi in charge of occupied Paris, had had an overcoat made in the summer of 1944 "because he thought it would be cold in a POW camp." Kozo Okamato, the only surviving Red Army Faction (RAF) member to bomb Lod airport, tells him he became a terrorist after being dumped twice by girlfriends. "At the time the RAF seemed a less demanding lover." These are the insights that animate Lapierre's work, and he is never afraid to find the humanity in even the most apparently evil of people.
However, this tendency is both a virtue and his undoing, as Lapierre sometimes allows his obvious affection for his subject to cloud all judgment. An example can be found in his accounts of Lord Mountbatten of Burma. Mountbatten was a known charmer, but his record on the partition of India does not bear scrutiny. His fudging of the boundaries, and the speed with which he acted, was undoubtedly a significant factor in the mass bloodshed that followed. Lapierre lets him off the hook with a single sentence: "By extricating his country from the Indian wasps' nest without spilling a drop of British blood, Mountbatten had saved Great Britain from one of those colonial wars of which France had made a speciality." Even for a partisan observer, this simply will not do. But a journalist who cares too much is always preferable to one who doesn't care at all, and Lapierre especially so, for the range and depth of his reportage, if nothing else. He harks back to a more innocent age when public figures were more open and trusting; few journalists would get anything like the access to equivalent figures today. Enjoy him, warts and all. You won't see his like again. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Author of seven major international bestsellers over the past 30 years and read by over 100 million readers worldwide, journalist Dominique Lapierre has won international acclaim for his inspirational accounts of the events that have shaped the 20th century. At last, he offers a stirring memoir of his adventures at the center of history. In "A Thousand Suns," Lapierre introduces the heroes and heroines whose actions have influenced the course of human events — from Mother Teresa and the slums of Calcutta, to a legendary matador in the bull rings of Spain, to the final days of the British Raj in India, and more. From the bestselling author of The City of Joy and coauthor of Is Paris Burning? comes a memoir of the extraordinary individuals and events that shaped the 20th century. From Mother Teresa and the slums of Calcutta to a legendary matador in the bull rings of Spain to the final days of the British Raj in India, "A Thousand Suns" tells of the extraordinary individuals and events that have shaped the 20th century. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780446675956
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