The unlikely past of a luxury hotel—during a horrific time—rendered with vigor and pathos.
So much history under one roof.
The Lutetia is a rare grand hotel on Paris’ Left Bank. A “transatlantic liner of a place,” in historian Rogoyska’s words, it’s a 1910 edifice whose “undulating façade” is festooned with “shell-like canopies…vine motifs [and] greedy cherubs.” Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were repeat guests, James Joyce lived there for a time, and Ernest Hemingway drank at its basement bar. In 1933, as the Nazis came to power, thousands of German refugees, most of them Jewish, fled to Paris, many gathering at the Lutetia; it came to be known as the “Switzerland of Paris” for hosting, among other exiles, the writer Heinrich Mann. As Rogoyska shows in her lively and well-paced account, this began an improbable chapter in the hotel’s history. Shortly after Nazis took control of Paris in 1940—she reminds readers that more than 90,000 French soldiers were killed fighting the Nazis—the German army’s intelligence service, the Abwehr, installed itself in the hotel. Four years later, after the Germans were pushed out of the city, the Lutetia served as a hospital of sorts for almost 20,000 returning deportees who needed medical attention and nourishment. The author’s present-tense narration adds an unnecessary sense of urgency, but she includes plenty of details that will resonate with readers. For example, a member of the Abwehr, not knowing how to eat an artichoke, angrily accused a chef of trying to have him choke: “They are, at heart, insecure, these occupiers,” Rogoyska writes. Keen to keep wines and champagnes from the Nazis, staffers squirreled away bottles in the cellar, then built a wall to hide them. And, poignantly, Red Cross volunteers walked into a room with breakfast for three resistance fighters who had been at the Buchenwald concentration camp. One dropped a plate, shocked by what she saw: “They had tried to sleep on the big, comfortable hotel beds but had lost the habit,” Rogoyska writes, “so they ended up on the floor.”
The unlikely past of a luxury hotel—during a horrific time—rendered with vigor and pathos.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781324089902
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.
A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.
On Aug. 16, 1897, the steam whaler Belgica set off from Belgium with young Adrien de Gerlache as commandant. Thus begins Sancton’s riveting history of exploration, ingenuity, and survival. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer. After loading a half ton of explosive tonite, the ship set sail with 23 crew members and two cats. In Rio de Janeiro, they were joined by Dr. Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. In Punta Arenas, four seamen were removed for insubordination, and rats snuck onboard. In Tierra del Fuego, the ship ran aground for a while. Sancton evokes a calm anxiety as he chronicles the ship’s journey south. On Jan. 19, 1898, near the South Shetland Islands, the crew spotted the first icebergs. Rough waves swept someone overboard. Days later, they saw Antarctica in the distance. Glory was “finally within reach.” The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens. The ship continued through a perilous, ice-littered sea, as the commandant was anxious to reach a record-setting latitude. On March 6, the Belgica became icebound. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton. The sun returned on July 22, and by March 1899, they were able to escape the ice. With a cast of intriguing characters and drama galore, this history reads like fiction and will thrill fans of Endurance and In the Kingdom of Ice.
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984824-33-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.
An epistolary memoir of Nelson Mandela’s prison years.
From August 1962 to February 1990, Mandela (1918-2013) was imprisoned by the apartheid state of South Africa. During his more than 27 years in prison, the bulk of which he served on the notorious Robben Island prison off the shores of Cape Town, he wrote thousands of letters to family and friends, lawyers and fellow African National Congress members, prison officials, and members of the government. Heavily censored for both content and length, letters from Robben Island and South Africa’s other political prisons did not always reach their intended targets; when they did, the censorship could make them virtually unintelligible. To assemble this vitally important collection, Venter (A Free Mind: Ahmed Kathrada's Notebook from Robben Island, 2006, etc.), a longtime Johannesburg-based editor and journalist, pored through these letters in various public and private archives across South Africa and beyond as well as Mandela’s own notebooks, in which he transcribed versions of these letters. The result is a necessary, intimate portrait of the great leader. The man who emerges is warm and intelligent and a savvy, persuasive, and strategic thinker. During his life, Mandela was a loving husband and father, a devotee of the ANC’s struggle, and capable of interacting with prominent statesmen and the ANC’s rank and file. He was not above flattery or hard-nosed steeliness toward his captors as suited his needs, and he was always yearning for freedom, not only—or even primarily—for himself, but rather for his people, a goal that is the constant theme of this collection and was the consuming vision of his entire time as a prisoner. Venter adds tremendous value with his annotations and introductions to the work as a whole and to the book’s various sections.
A valuable contribution to our understanding of one of history’s most vital figures.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-117-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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