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La Place de la Concorde Suisse

John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN10: 0374519323
ISBN13: 9780374519322

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160 Pages

$19.00

CA$25.00

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In admirable disregard for the orthodoxy of public relations, the Swiss Army chose Luc Massy to be the soldier-companion of the American observer John McPhee during various exercises of a "refresher" course among the high Alps. The Swiss Army is militia, composed of 650,000 people who can be fully mobilized in less than forty-eight hours but generally pursue civilian occupations while their assault rifles repose under their beds and in closets at home. The easygoing, irreverent Massy—a master winemaker from the Canton de Vaud—can take the army or leave it alone. On patrol as leader of Section de Renseignments, he helps McPhee to gather his own information for a book full of wit and deft characterization—actually a portrait of Switzerland within the frame of its militia, and of the thoroughly interwined relationships between the army and the society it serves.

Reviews

Praise for La Place de la Concorde Suisse

"McPhee, in showing us as many aspects of the Swiss Army as their famous knife has blades, has produced one of his books."—Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

"The Swiss have avoided fighting a war for almost 500 years. To preserve that enviable record of peace, they maintain one of the world's largest armies, on a per capita basis. This paradox . . . is the core of McPhee's engaging La Place de la Concorde Suisse."Jack Schnedler, Chicago Sun-Times

"Delightful . . . What McPhee saw and learned he writes about with his inimitable light touch."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"'Switzerland does not have an army,' says one of John McPhee's informants in La Place de la Concorde Suisse. 'Switzerland is an army' . . . McPhee put his reader inside Switzerland with elegance and insight."—Jonathan Steinberg, The New York Times Book Review

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

Place de la Concorde Suisse, La

The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years, and are determined to know how so as not to.
In Italy, it has been said of the Swiss Army, "I didn't know they had one." When...

About the author

John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Yolanda Whitman

The Mind of John McPhee: Feature Article, The New York Times Magazine