Paris

June 11, 2012
Saturated with sadness, regret, and Hemingway, Marton’s (Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story) memoir of widowhood after the death of husband Richard Holbrooke recalls how Paris offered her the peace and salve she needed to assuage a broken heart. A refugee from Hungary with her family in 1957, Paris was where Marton attended university during the tumultuous late 1960s; as a foreign correspondent with ABC News in the 1970s, the city served as a base for her work, and was also where she and anchorman Peter Jennings conducted their love affair before marrying in 1979. Fleeing that marriage in 1993 after two children (Jennings is described as cold and manipulative), Marton found a warm, willing relationship with Holbrooke, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, with Paris as the meeting place in their busy lives. Married in her native Budapest in 1995, the couple jet-setted all over the world, especially to war-torn sites, as Holbrooke brokered the peace in Bosnia and later was named special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan. His sudden death by a heart attack in 2010 struck a terrible blow, and Marton retreated again to Paris, where she and Holbrooke had purchased a pied-à-terre in the Latin Quarter in 2005 and where she now found solace. Filled with details of a life richly lived, Marton’s memoir has a requisite, wooden feel, as if publicly making the necessary gestures without being emotionally present. Agent, Amanda Urban.