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New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam, by the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War “A female version of the Indiana Jones story . . . [Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt] was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame.”—The Guardian
In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground. Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.” Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam, by the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War “A female version of the Indiana Jones story . . . [Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt] was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame.”—The Guardian
In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: the international campaign to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the daring French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples—including the Temple of Dendur, now at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—would currently be at the bottom of a vast reservoir. It was an unimaginably complex project that required the fragile sandstone temples to be dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground. Willful and determined, Desroches-Noblecourt refused to be cowed by anyone or anything. As a member of the French Resistance in World War II she survived imprisonment by the Nazis; in her fight to save the temples she defied two of the most daunting leaders of the postwar world, Egypt’s President Abdel Nasser and France’s President Charles de Gaulle. As she told one reporter, “You don’t get anywhere without a fight, you know.” Desroches-Noblecourt also received help from a surprising source. Jacqueline Kennedy, America’s new First Lady, persuaded her husband to help fund the rescue effort. After a century and a half of Western plunder of Egypt’s ancient monuments, Desroches-Noblecourt helped instead to preserve a crucial part of that cultural heritage.
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Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the coverChapter 1
A Childhood Passion
Christiane’s early fascination with ancient Egypt was an unusual preoccupation for a little girl from the French upper middle class, which tended to have fairly rigid, conservative ideas about girls’ proper interests and behavior. But her parents had no desire to limit her horizons or encourage her to conform to the prevalent view in French society that women’s roles should be restricted to those of wife and mother.
That opinion was particularly strong in the aftermath of World War I, when Christiane was growing up. With more than 1.3 million of France’s young men killed in the war, the country’s birthrate had dropped dramatically. As a result, young women faced considerable pressure to marry and have children as soon as possible; contraception was illegal, and refusing motherhood was considered an unpatriotic act.
Christiane’s father, Louis, paid no attention to such ideas. He was unusual in other ways as well. A literature major in college, he was a lawyer by profession, but his true passions lay outside his work. He was a talented violinist, and Christiane recalled frequent impromptu evening duets in which he played the violin and her mother, Madeleine, who had an operatic voice, sang arias. On Sunday mornings in winter, her father would often lock himself in his office at home and study sheet music. When Christiane asked him what he was doing, he replied, “I am listening to an opera.” Indeed, she added, he could read the notes on paper and hear the music in his head, an ability that left her awestruck.
Somewhat surprisingly for someone of his social class, he was also a staunch man of the left, a lifelong advocate of individual freedom, tolerance, social equality, and economic justice. Madeleine Desroches, meanwhile, was one of the rare Frenchwomen of that time to have graduated from college, collecting a classics degree. Although she never worked outside the home, she was a powerful role model for her daughter—“living proof,” as Christiane said, “that a woman, no less than a man, could have access to the world of knowledge.” Her father, “already a feminist,” supported that principle as much for his daughter as he had for his wife.
“My parents were humanists,” Desroches later told an interviewer. “They taught me humanist values such as respect for one another, for your neighbors, for people in general, respect for civilization. My brother and I grew up in an environment very open to culture, music, and foreign languages.” For both Desroches children, curiosity about the world outside France was highly encouraged.
Unlike many of their more insular compatriots, Louis and Madeleine Desroches had an eclectic group of friends, some of them intellectuals, who came from a wide variety of countries and cultures. Once, Desroches remembered, her father told her that “we were considered to be strange people because we received strangers.” She added, “Believe me, there were very few Parisians at that time who felt the same way.” Among the Desroches family’s closest friends were Sir Norman Angell, the Nobel Prize–winning British economist, and his family. The two families often spent several weeks together in the summer.
From her earliest days, the petite, dark-haired Christiane was talkative, opinionated, curious, and self-confident—all qualities that her parents encouraged. From the time they were small, she and her older brother were included in mealtime conversations about a wide variety of subjects, from current events in France and the...
Reviews-
Starred review from November 21, 2022 Bestseller Olson follows up Madame Fourcade’s Secret War with another scintillating biography of a woman who worked in the French Resistance against the Nazis. But Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt (1913–2011) had an even more impressive second act, according to Olson: as an Egyptologist, she spearheaded “the greatest single example of international cultural cooperation the world has ever known,” a campaign in the 1950s and ’60s to save Nubian temples and other antiquities from flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Throughout, Olson details the misogyny Desroches-Noblecourt dealt with from her male colleagues at the Louvre and the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, even as she reached the top of her field. Beginning in 1958, she helped raised money from dozens of nations to dismantle the temples block-by-block, transport them up the Nile, and rebuild them on higher ground. Olson also credits first lady Jackie Kennedy with helping persuade her husband’s administration to support the campaign, and documents Desroches-Noblecourt’s involvement in a 1967 Paris exhibition of King Tutankhamun’s treasures. Enriched by fascinating digressions into Egyptian history, museum rivalries, the plundering of archaeological sites, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and more, this is a captivating portrait of a pathbreaking woman. Readers will be enthralled. Photos.
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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The life of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt translates well to audio. This biography tells the story of the pioneering archaeologist who helped save treasures from the Louvre during WWII and was a major force behind rescuing ancient Egyptian monuments from flooding due to the building of the Aswan Dam. The book's straightforward style is well suited to audio, and Lisa Flanagan offers an able narration. Her delivery flows even during extended passages of historical background. She effectively conveys the frustrations and excitement of Desroches-Noblecourt's life, especially the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated field at that time. The suspense mounts as Flanagan describes the race against time to save the giant statues of Pharaoh Ramses II. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
