Synopsis
When young Mattie Mills comes to Jexville, Mississippi, as the mail-order bride of the local barber, she finds a quiet, deeply religious community so cautious that even dancing is frowned upon. The only vitality comes from the McVay family, with whom Mattie quickly strikes up a strong friendship.
As Mattie plunges over her head in the swirling currents of other people's lives, her own floodtide of discontent rises. She discovers the disappointments of her marriage and finds herself falling for another man.
Reviews
In 1989, Jean Frydman, a director of L'Oreal, the highly profitable Paris-based cosmetics conglomerate, learned he had "resigned" at a board of directors meeting that never actually took place. A hero of the French Resistance, founder of Paravision (a L'Oreal subsidiary), a Jew and a part-time resident of Israel, Frydman suspected that his resignation had been forged to meet the demands of the Arab League, which, at that time, was enforcing a ban?illegal in both France and the U.S.?on businesses with ties to Israel. He later began to suspect that the instigator of his removal was Jacques Correze, a former Nazi collaborator and convicted war criminal who was head of the company's U.S. operation. The ensuing lawsuits created a scandal in France. As retold by Bar-Zohar, a novelist and a biographer of David Ben-Gurion, L'Oreal was a hotbed of former Nazi sympathizers all too willing to bribe and be pressured by anti-Zionists. It also had friends in high places, Bar-Zohar claims, as high as French President Francois Mitterand, who appeared publicly as an archenemy of the boycott. The author milks the situation for its melodrama, with reconstructed conversation, numerous flashbacks and trumped-up suspense. He seems to be hoping reviewers will say his tale, though true, reads like a novel. It might have read even better as straightforward journalism, since he has unsuccessfully blended reportage with the techniques of fiction.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
An unconvincing attempt to link cosmetic giant L'Or‚al's alleged obeisance to the Arab boycott of Israel to French wartime collaboration with the Nazis. A recent Israeli magazine included a two-page ad from Paris-based L'Or‚al headlined ``Beauty Without Boundaries.'' It was typical of dozens of such ads in the past year, apparently calculated to repair the damage done by the company's long-alleged illegal cooperation with the Syrian-based office that decides which companies should be boycotted in the Arab world for doing business with Israel. Journalist, novelist, and one-time Israeli Knesset member Bar-Zohar (Brothers, 1993, etc.) escalates the PR war, first by attempting to nail L'Or‚al on the boycott issue with a mountain of evidence, and then by attacking the company for employing several men with alleged ties to France's WW II collaborationist government. But the absence of footnotes makes it impossible to judge the reliability of his evidence in this matter. And the book's sensationalistic style only serves to cloud the issues. Bar- Zohar's apparently heavy reliance on the brothers Jean and David Frydman as sources further damages the book's credibility. Jean Frydman has dual Israeli-French citizenship and was allegedly removed from the board of a L'Or‚al subsidiary to comply with the Arab boycott. The Frydmans and L'Or‚al are engaged in numerous suits and countersuits, and, in the absence of detailed sourcing, there is no way of judging the credibility of their allegations. Bar-Zohar cites enough documentation to make many of his unsavory broadsides against L'Or‚al stick, but he offers absolutely no evidence to connect the war records of L'Or‚al officers to actions taken 40 years later. Bar-Zohar apparently expects readers to assume that yesterday's collaborationists would rather do business with Arabs than Jews. Such unsubstantiated charges smack more of smear than revelation. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Bar-Zohar (Brothers, LJ 3/15/93), a specialist on Jewish-Arab relations, presents another masterpiece (previously published in Israel) about the corruptions and violations of France's antiboycott laws by L'Oreal, a giant French conglomerate, with the "zealous cooperation of the French embassy in Damascus" and other important French dignitaries. Bar-Zohar relates how L'Oreal yielded to the Arab boycott of Israeli products, which started even before the birth of the state of Israel. He also gives a fascinating look into France's murky past during World War II, following the complex story of President Francois Mitterand's right-wing connections during his youth, activities as an official of the Petain government at Vichy, and his continued and shadowy ties with top L'Oreal executives. The author also delves into the shadowy past of L'Oreal owner Andre Bettencourt, a cabinet minister, senator, and recipient of the Resistance medal who was on the payroll of the Propaganda Ministry of Nazi Germany. Bar-Zohar's work is richly detailed and clearly argued but not well documented. It is a remarkable work designed for nonspecialists.?Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast, Long Beach
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Though the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s appears to be moribund, vestiges still remain--and in some unlikely places. Official biographer of David Ben-Gurion and novelist, Bar-Zohar documents the very strange truth of how certain top L'Oreal managers collaborated with Hitler and how they conspired to eradicate an existing Arab boycott on their products in the 1990s. The story begins--and ends--with Jean Frydman, a French-Israeli executive running one of the cosmetic giant's subsidiaries. Told to resign for no apparently valid reason, Frydman launched a series of investigations and lawsuits that eventually led to the resignations of high-ranking businessmen. Jacques Correze, the president of L'Oreal's Cosmair in New York City, was part of La Cagoule, a band of Hitler sympathizers; and AndreBettencourt, a L'Oreal director and friend of French president Mitterrand, was found to have been on the payroll of the propaganda ministry of Nazi Germany. Revelations such as these shocked the world press--and will probably do the same for readers in this well-wrought, fact-filled book. Barbara Jacobs
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