This is the story of the eclipse of the British Raj and the birth of an independent India and Pakistan. The fabled India of the maharajas, with their palaces and harems, their gold-caparisoned elephants and their glittering private armies—the India of Kipling’s legendary army, with its young British officers commanding troops of a dozen races, religions, and castes—the India of tiger hunts and pigsticking, of sadhus and holy men—the India that was the heart and soul of an empire—underwent a violent transformation into the new India of Gandhi and Nehru, precursor of the Third World. At the center of this drama are Nehru, Jinnah, Mountbatten and, of course, Gandhi, the gentle prophet of revolution, who stirred the masses of the most populous area on earth without raising his voice.

“Is Paris burning?” is the question Hitler asked over and over as the French Second and American Fourth Divisions battered their way into the city.

Few moments in history are as stirring as the Allied liberation of Paris, yet few people are aware of how narrowly–and how miraculously–the city escaped Hitler’s secret plan to reduce it to ashes. Is Paris Burning? reconstructs, in meticulous and riveting detail, the network of fateful events–day by day, moment by moment–that saved the City of Light.

Bestselling authors and renowned journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre spent three years researching this book, drawing on French Resistance radio messages, German military records, countless interviews, and secret correspondence between de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Here they recreate the drama, the fervor, and the triumph that heralded one of the most dramatic events of our time.

“Is Paris burning?” is the question Hitler asked over and over as the French Second and American Fourth Divisions battered their way into the city.

Few moments in history are as stirring as the Allied liberation of Paris, yet few people are aware of how narrowly—and how miraculously—the city escaped Hitler’s secret plan to reduce it to ashes. Is Paris Burning? reconstructs, in meticulous and riveting detail, the network of fateful events—day by day, moment by moment—that saved the City of Light.

Bestselling authors and renowned journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre spent three years researching this book, drawing on French Resistance radio messages, German military records, countless interviews, and secret correspondence between de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Here they re-create the drama, the fervor, and the triumph that heralded one of the most dramatic events of our time.

At the center of this massive and brilliant book is the most universal of man’s cities: Jerusalem, the mystic heart of three great religions, condemned to pay for the passions it inspires by being, through forty centuries, the most bitterly disputed site in the world.

Collins and Lapierre’s story is the fruit of five years of intensive research and many thousands of interviews. It is the epic drama of 1948, in which the Arabs and the Jews, heirs to generations of bitter conflict in a land sacred to them both, fought each other for the city of Jerusalem and for the hopes of fulfillment it represented to each. Here is the account of that struggle that encompasses the full spectrum of its participants, whose experiences, emotions, and acts of bravery have been meticulously brought together and illumined in this monumental and dramatic work.