This Anguish Like A Kind Of Intimate Song

This literary history explores the reality of European women's roles in fighting Nazism. By comparing the resistance literature of French and German authors, this book links the traditional gender expectations for women and the conventions of their everyday lives with their unique forms of resistance. Theirs was an opposition grounded in the ordinary, beyond the sphere of political violence. Women were long regarded as outsiders to combat and politics, with no stake in upholding resistance myths. Women authors therefore freely rendered the personal and moral landscape of the resister's world in a new vocabulary. They revised standard rhetoric and replaced heroism and bullets with the values of home, human relationships, and candid acknowledgement of the sorrow, fear, and uncertainty of war.

This book explores the fine line between fiction and history and considers how France’s cultural production has contributed to shaping the image of the French Resistance. Though an examination of the lenses through which France has regarded its recent past, the book offers a key to understanding France’s national psyche.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The dramatic, untold history of the heroic women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory in World War II “Gripping. Spies, romance, Gestapo thugs, blown-up trains, courage, and treachery (lots of treachery)—and all of it true.”—Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France. In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently de­classified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There’s Andrée Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE’s unflap­pable “queen.” Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence—laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war. Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage—and the energy of politically animated women—can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high. Praise for D-Day Girls “Rigorously researched . . . [a] thriller in the form of a non-fiction book.”—Refinery29 “Equal parts espionage-romance thriller and historical narrative, D-Day Girls traces the lives and secret activities of the 39 women who answered the call to infiltrate France. . . . While chronicling the James Bond-worthy missions and love affairs of these women, Rose vividly captures the broken landscape of war.”—The Washington Post “Gripping history . . . thoroughly researched and written as smoothly as a good thriller, this is a mesmerizing story of creativity, perseverance, and astonishing heroism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Wholeness is a process that encompasses all that we are as humans-in-interaction. The contemporary human is in a great deal of psychological distress. As a result, people do all sorts of extreme things to ease the tension. For instance, some become hedonistic with inordinate desires for drugs (alcohol, tranquilizers, etc.), food, and sex; whereas some become fanatical in their belief system, including religious beliefs, with tendency toward externality. The extent that the human person succeeds in integrating the physical, psychosocial and spiritual domain is the extent that humanity evolves to a higher level of consciousness whereby the individual being at peace with oneself, reaches out creatively and assertively to neighbours, and to the larger world that encompasses humans and the natural order in harmony.

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This study of the Latin American art song and its development in the context of musical nationalism shows how the song is a mirror in which the processes of conformation to Latin American national identity are reflected.