Athene Palace

Hardcover Cloth 304 pages. Condition Very Good Dust Jacket Very Good. Presumed First edition 1998. Handsome black boards and gilt embossing shows off this Clean, tight, square copy with no marks, highlights or bookplates. Book Well kept and carefully stored in unread condition. Slight shelf wear. Sewn in ribbon. An unclipped dust jacket smooth and brilliant with slight shelf wear - a few stains, wrinkles and chips. Not an ex-library, book club or remainder copy.

A book of journalistic memoirs about the second half of the terrible year 1940 in the history of Romania, the author being a witness to the defining events of that year from the rooms, the halls and from the windows of the Athene Palace hotel, in the center of Bucharest.

As European capitals fell during 1940 and 1941, there swarmed to the Athene Palace, Bucharest's "Grand Hotel," diplomats, generals, Gestapo spies, and demi-mondaines from all over Europe. Arriving at the crowded Athene Palace on the day Paris fell in 1940, the American journalist Rosa Goldschmidt Waldeck watched for the seven months following all the events and international figures that made Romania Europe's last sensational hotbed of intrigue and color.

For history enthusiasts, in general, and the history of Romania, in particular, this volume represents a golden opportunity to see Romania in 1940 through the eyes of a foreigner, a witness as objective as possible, all wrapped up in a high-class historical and journalistic narrative.