This explosive narrative reveals for the first time the shocking hidden years of Coco Chanel’s life: her collaboration with the Nazis in Paris; her affair with a master spy; and her work for the German military intelligence service and Himmler’s SS.Gabrielle “Coco†Chanel was the high priestess of couture who created the look of the modern woman. By the 1920s she had amassed a fortune and went on to create an empire. But her life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumor and mystery; never clarified by Chanel or her many biographers. Hal Vaughan exposes the truth of her wartime collaboration and her long affair with the playboy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage—who ran a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan pieces together how Chanel became a Nazi agent; how she escaped arrest after the war and joined her lover in exile in Switzerland; and how—despite suspicions about her past—she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and rebuild the iconic House of Chanel.
#1564286 in Books 2014-01-14 2014-01-14Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 7.98 x .73 x 5.16l; .60 #File Name: 0307389596352 pages
Review
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Worthy of the effortBy MT57The book has a noble aim; to convince the reader that historians; pundits and others who claim that humanity is divided by religion; class; race; gender; etc are wrong. He partially succeeds. I say partially because; while he sometimes shows greater commonality in history; he sometimes shows a fragmentation into more than two camps on the particular dividing theme; and sometimes he just argues that the claim is just based on poor analysis; period.I give it high marks for its noble purpose; but also because the breadth of scholarship is astonishing. An amazing amount of intellectual history is covered in this book; beyond my ability to assimilate in the rest of my lifetime.I found it a bit difficult to read. It's actually very well written; not at all ponderous or condescending or elitist. It was just that; once I had finished one section of the book; good as it was; I could pretty much guess how the rest of the chapters were going to proceed; and so often found myself choosing not to pick it up and continue because of that. But eventually I kept at it and was glad I did. It is a very learned and yet at the same time heartfelt book.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. The Great DivideBy Kenneth BuckCannadine argues that we are more than a collective solidarity; that the world is not binary and that the Manichean view of a monolithic good on one side and a monolithic evil on the other is too simplistic and factually incorrect. He reviews what he believes are the six primary differences or divides creating this false impression (Religion; Nation; Class; Gender; Race; and Civilization) and shows us that these categories of identity and difference have not precluded us from working and living together in an "Undivided Past."I am not sure I can agree with his understanding of the past and I can't help but wonder whether he missed the most important way we humans identify. A seventh chapter on our liberal/conservative divide would seem appropriate since aspects of the other six divides are clearly found in the fundamental beliefs of both liberal and conservative thought. In fact the liberal/conservative divide seems to me to be the underlying divide in all six of the categories of human identity Cannadine discusses.A very interesting read; but I hope he completes the discussion with a volume two on the "Great Divide: Conservative/Liberal Conflict in History"3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Good book; overstated titleBy J. BraceyCarradine's volume is a welcome counterbalance to the torrent of volumes which describe the things which divide us. I couldn't help but notice that Carradine necessarily spends many of his words (sometimes) explicitly and (more often) implicitly agreeing with some significant portion of what all those other authors say about our divisions. The value in his work is that while he cannot utterly destroy the concepts of difference; he does manage to demonstrate that those litanies of difference are not the whole story. His title is therefore something of an overstatement; a marketing necessity; it appears. A more accurate but far less appealing and "sexy" title would have been: _The Divisions of our Past Aren't as Desperately Bad as Others Want You to Believe; and We're Not Well Served by Focusing on Division_. (Now THAT'S an atrocity of a title! No wonder he chose differently.)
