Europeans - Softcover

Kramer, Jane

4.1

20 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140128085 ISBN 13: 9780140128086

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1990

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Detailed and sensitive accounts of the people of France, Germany, Austria, England, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, and Hungary and their struggles and joys are presented in a collection of essays

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From Publishers Weekly:

In this collection of 30 of her "Letter from Europe" pieces for the New Yorker , Kramer shines as a writer who refuses to oversimplify the complexity of people and events. She notes that Kurt Waldheim consigned to death Serbian partisans and Greek Jews with equal zeal, then goes on to consider how this bureaucrat dressed himself in patriot's clothes and seduced an Austria that wants to believe in him. Kramer can be deceptively casual. Her travel piece on Hamburg broadens into an analysis of Germany confronting its national conscience. Her account of the Paribas bank scandal involving secret Swiss accounts probes French attitudes toward cheating and state authority. Whether she is writing about a Paris-based rock musician from Cameroon, her Portuguese concierge, a Milanese psychoanalyst-cum-con artist, French anti-heroic novelist Emmanuel Bove or a German town's resistance to U.S. nuclear weapons, she has an eye for the telling detail that reveals character. Kramer is an essential guide to the contemporary European scene.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Under the rubric, "Letter from Europe," these elegant and timeless essays appeared over the last ten years in the New Yorker . Kramer leads with a series of masterly portraits of ordinary Europeans and their lives, followed by reports from five cities: Hamburg, Paris, Zurich, London, and Berlin. She digs behind the headlines and examines, on the local level, the effect of such major concerns as defense and immigration. In doing so, she presents, not a dusty chronicle of events, but a potpourri of reports on various subjects of general interest. Among the more than 30 essays are reflections on everything from life in Hungary to the Klaus Barbie trial. An important purchase.Ian Wallace, Agriculture Canada Lib., St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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