De Gaulle

This short biography by Julian Jackson sketches the French leader as a man of high ideals and hard-nosed pragmatism. Maintaining France's grandeur was the objective, but de Gaulle was no starry-eyed dreamer. "In economics as in politics or strategy, there is no absolute truth ... only circumstances." Long before Clinton or Blair, de Gaulle was taking a "third way" between the harshness of unbridled capitalism and the despotism of extreme socialism.

Wave

Wave, an account of the 2004 tsunami by a survivor who lost her husband, two sons, and parents, suffers from the lack of a strong editorial hand. The insights into grief are blunted by poor punctuation and syntax.

A City Solitary

Nicholas Freeling's publisher did him both a favor and a disservice when he declared that Freeling's first novel was a detective story. Love in Amsterdam has a detective, Piet Van der Valk, but the novel makes more sense as literary fiction than as potboiler. The favor is that the Van der Valk character was resurrected and formed the basis for a successful series (with another detective, a Frenchman, to follow). The disservice is that Freeling deserves more credit for his deep character studies than for his scenes of gunplay or detecting. A City Solitary, published in 1985 as a suspense novel, revolves around a middle-aged writer, living in France with his wife, who is attacked in what would now be called a home invasion. The writer is a man out of his time who comes to connect with one of the young criminals. Plot and dialogue take a back seat to character and ideas in this sometimes meandering but ultimately satisfying novel.