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Show FiRiOtM s Ft 11 LM MTa O a PAt Ga FalaQaTalaoaN Reel Reading NORA, NORA ; After a flurry of success last winter (defer House Rules, Antris'f Ashes), the trend continues Into the summer blockbuster season. Whle you're waiting for Harry Potter and Bridget Jones to make their screen ! s from the debuts, check out the books and special summers most popular movies. By Anne Rivers Siddons best-hearte- HarperCollins, $25 ISBN 006017613X Fm Unabridged, 529.95, ISBN 0694523208; abridged, $25, ISBN 0694523321 tie-in- CHICKEN RUN A Bock of books is 1 wondering how anyone could make a whole movie from clay chickens, read Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie (Harry N. Abrams, $35, ISBN 0810941244). THE PATRIOT The Patriot (Harper Entertainment, $6.99, ISBN 0061020761) provides the novelizstion of the blockbuster Mel Gibson film, and The Patriot The Official Companion (Carlton Books, $19.95, ISBN 1842220764) takes you behind the scenes with interviews with the cast, director, and producers, and information on how the Smithsonian Institution helped oversee the production for historical accuracy. THE PERFECT STORM Sebastian lunger's novel. The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (Harper, $6.99, ISBN 00610135 IX), a tale of a doomed ship caught in the middle of what some meteorologists Have caRed the storm of the century, was a hit on the shelves and in theaters. You may know the ending already, but the descriptions of storm formation, wave physics, and the terror of drowning are stM fascinating. THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO And in the category comes Whit Stillman, who took Ms witty movie, The Last Days of Disco, fleshed R out, and made R Into a book. The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petnossian Afterwards I (Farrar, Straus Giroux, $23, ISBN 0374183392) looks at the last months of the disco era, following a group of new to Manhattan guys and gals and the popular dance club that becomes the center of their nightlife. 1 HaiasaTaOaRaY STRANGE VICTORY Hitlers Conquest of France By Hifl Ernest R. May Wang, $26 l 0809089068 ISBN REVIEW BY ROGER BISHOP Why did Germany defeat France so easily in 1940? Conventional thinking has focused on three reasons. The first of these reasons that Germany had superior troop strength and more sophisticated has been shown to be false. weaponry The second, that the French troops were badly led. has also been discredited. Third, the charge that there was a "moral laxness" among the French soldiers does not hold up either. During the six weeks of lighting. France lost appioximalely I24.(XX) men with another 2(X),(XX) wounded, and reports indicate that most French units displayed gallantry. What did or did not happen? Harvard historian Lrnest Mav surveys a broad range of factors on both sides that led to the outcome in his absorbing diplomatic. political, and military history Strange ictory: Hillers Conquest of France. The author emphasizes the high level of confidence that prevailed in France before the German invasion in May and continued in certain places even after the Germans were on French ' REVIEW BY LYNN HAMILTON avaiabie for youngsters who didn't get enough of their feathered friends in the movie. Check out Ginger's plans to fly the coop in Chicken Run (Dreamworks, $7.99, ISBN 0525464204) or more crazy exploits in Chicken Run Cutting Loose; Behind the Fences at Tweedy's Farm (Dreamworks, $7.99, ISBN 0141308788). If youre soil. The arrogance of the French leaders they knew they had superiority in crucial areas and that Germany was aware of it was a crucial factor in their defeat. A second reason, to minimize the loss of life, was certainly understandable alter such great losses in World War I. The Maginot Line was. the author says, "indicative neither of despair about defeating Germany nor of thought mired in the past. It was instead ev idence of faith that technology could substitute for manpower." The third factor he focuses on is the cumbersomeness of French, as well as British and Belgian, military bureaucracies. In a nutshell. "Germany's strange v ictory occurred because the French and British tailed to take advantage ol then superiority May explores the interplay of domestic politics and foreign policy decisions over the years leading up to the German invasion. By the mid- I92(K Hiller had become a masterful demagogue and laid out some of Ins basic beliefs in Mein Kampl In 19.17, he talked to bis army generals and foreign minister about the need to use force to expand the nation to gam new resources and territory. May notes that Hitler did not trust official memoranda or other documents from - of adulthood in an era when gender dictated more rigid roles than it docs now. Siddons accurately captures the d impulse that leads even the adults to make children over in their own image. One of the novel's funniest and most, painful episodes is Peytorus trip to the beauty parlor, w here tomboy Peyton is made over into a southern belle, complete w ith heavy makeup, under her aunt's iron hand. The next day, Peyton gets transformed, yet again, into the image of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's by her nightclub hopping, feminist cousin Nora. Nora, Nora effectively explores the extent to which people fail to change. The novel's three principle characters are trapped not only in the mores of a small southern town, which the civil rights movement threatens to leave behind, but also in their own individual comfort zones. Even Peyton's likable father. Frazier, a law yer and advocate of gration. presses only so hard for badly needed reforms to Lyttons school and For most readers of Nora, Nora, the title character will steal the show. A w hiff of scandal accompanies Nora's arrival in Lytton. a sleepy, rural Georgia town. She smokes, cusses, and wears a that says. "Jesus is coming. Look busy. Its 1961 and Nora wants revolution. She wants it now. She tries to railroad Lytton with change, teaching Tropic of Cancer in a public high school barely ready (or To Kill a Mockingbird. Nora's seeming cynicism masks a more fundamental naivete. She believes that if she shows people the new horizons they hunger for, they w ill guard her secrets. That she is betrayed from almost every side is the novel's central heartbreak. Siddons has written a string of bestsellers, including Low Country and Outer Banks, whose titles reflect their Southern settings. The author's finest achievement in her new book may be w ith the character Peyton, a girl hovering unwillingly on the brink class systems. Change and transformation dont come as easily to people in real life as they do in the movies, and Siddons shows us that reality. 4' Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybte 1 diplomats. Instead he "assiduously read German translations of foreign newspapers and magazines . . . Hitler insisted on extracts, no summaries. He particularly demanded material on foreign leaders." These sources helped Hiller predict how certain personalities would react to specific challenges. The author introduces the primary political figures in France, in particular Edouard Daladier. who was prime minister of France from April 1938 until the spring of 1940. Perhaps as important, he served as war minister and defense minister when he was named prime minister and continued in those positions as well. Although he insisted on significantly increasing Frances ground and uir forces s throughout the his grim experiences in the Great War made him very reluctant to send troops into battle. May probes the importance of military intelligence for both the Allies und Germany. Though the Allies couldn't possibly have predicted all that Germany planned to do, there were signals that should have alerted them to the danger. The author says their failure to recognize the extent of the German threat is attributable largely to charac mid-'30- rirlua Island. Georgia. teristics of their systems of collecting and analyzing intelligence and to their lack of system in relating this intelli" gence to their own May notes that most writings about the 1940 surprise have missed this point "in large part because their authors have been taken in by veterans of the French intelligence services who claimed to have perceived what the Germans were going to do. sounded loud warnings, and been ignored bv d gener-- ( als and politicians. But little or no evidence dating from the period itself supports this claim." The author has w ritten the only account that deals in depth with both Germany and France. Also, it is the only one that fix' uses on intelligence analysis as a key clement. May sees contemporary relevance for w hat happened then. "The Western demixracies Uxlay," he notes, exhibit many of the same that France and Britain did in 1938-4- 0 arrogance, a strong disinclination to risk life in battle, on technology as a substitute. and governmental procedures poorly designed for anticipating or coping with ingenious challenges from live comparatively weak." This dramatic story could have turned out differently. May enlightens and stimulates our thinking about decision making in times of ensis. 4' decision-making.- dull-witte- i heavy-relianc- Roger Bishop is a trgular contributor to BookPage. "7" |