BOOK

Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (Yale, $35). New from the author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, the first book-length study of how France’s culturati coped with the German occupation. The answer is in the title. Virtually all French artists played ball with the Nazis in one way or another, and some of the greatest (including the incomparable pianist Alfred Cortot) did their bidding with foul alacrity. Spotts’ book is insufficiently detailed and lacks full source notes, but the story it tells is both true and compelling–as well as depressing. Anyone naïve enough to think of artists as a nobler breed should read it and weep (TT).