June 11, 2012
Saturated with sadness, regret, and Hemingway, Marton’s (Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story) memoir of widowhood after the death of husband Richard Holbrooke recalls how Paris offered her the peace and salve she needed to assuage a broken heart. A refugee from Hungary with her family in 1957, Paris was where Marton attended university during the tumultuous late 1960s; as a foreign correspondent with ABC News in the 1970s, the city served as a base for her work, and was also where she and anchorman Peter Jennings conducted their love affair before marrying in 1979. Fleeing that marriage in 1993 after two children (Jennings is described as cold and manipulative), Marton found a warm, willing relationship with Holbrooke, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, with Paris as the meeting place in their busy lives. Married in her native Budapest in 1995, the couple jet-setted all over the world, especially to war-torn sites, as Holbrooke brokered the peace in Bosnia and later was named special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan. His sudden death by a heart attack in 2010 struck a terrible blow, and Marton retreated again to Paris, where she and Holbrooke had purchased a pied-à-terre in the Latin Quarter in 2005 and where she now found solace. Filled with details of a life richly lived, Marton’s memoir has a requisite, wooden feel, as if publicly making the necessary gestures without being emotionally present. Agent, Amanda Urban.
July 1, 2012
Paris provides a backdrop for this absorbing memoir of love and painful loss, played out on the larger stage of world politics. While walking the streets of Paris, former NPR and ABC News correspondent Marton (Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America, 2009, etc.) mourns her husband, Richard Holbrooke, who died suddenly in 2010. She writes about "experiencing the fluctuating rhythms of loss...grief crashing against a sudden zeal for life," as she remembers the times she and Holbrooke visited their favorite city. She reminisces about her first trip there as a student, at the age of 18, and her return a decade later as a foreign correspondent heading ABC's Bonn news bureau. Conducting a passionate though tortured relationship with news anchor Peter Jennings, she would rendezvous with him in Paris between covering events in European hotspots. Despite suffering from a traumatic separation from her parents (during their imprisonment by the Hungarian government), a painful divorce from Jennings and Holbrooke's death, the author writes of the moments when she is "filled with joy" at her good fortune in having been loved. The highlights of her story include her time in Bonn, during which she interviewed spies in Berlin, traveled to a Palestinian refugee camp, and covered political kidnappings by terrorists, and her later experience hosting notables during Holbrooke's stint as U.N. ambassador. On a first-name basis with the political movers and shakers on a global stage, Marton has observed world politics in the making and makes space for readers on her catbird seat.
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March 15, 2012
Paris is really important to journalist/author Marton (Enemies of the People). There she studied as a college student in the explosive year of 1968; researched her family's escapeto France from Communist Hungary; served as ABC bureau chief in a career break-through; met her first husband, Peter Jennings; and then met her second husband, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, finally returning to Paris to mourn his death. A distinctive view of the City of Light.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
July 1, 2012
For award-winning journalist Marton, through nearly every stage of her life, including long marriages to two well-known and dynamic men, Paris offered an exciting and engaging backdrop. Of Hungarian descent, she first learned Hungarian and French. She was in Paris as a student during the 1968 riots and demonstrations, which evoked memories of protests in Budapest and the arrest of her parents during the Nazi occupation. Ten years later, she was back in Paris as a correspondent for ABC News and just starting a relationship with Peter Jennings, later her husband and the father of her two children. She was also in Paris for Christmas with her children when the tumultuous marriage ended, and she began a friendship with diplomat Richard Holbrooke that blossomed into marriage and an enduring love until his death, in 2010. Finally, she returned to Paris as a widow, looking back on a life of passion in a city she loves. Marton offers an intimate look at her adventurous life in a book that is part romance, part travelogue, and part memoir of journalism and diplomacy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)