A humorous exploration of the sometimes fractious relationship between American and French citizens identifies the cultural beliefs and historical events that have spurred contempt between the two nations, from France's denial of air space during the U.S. bombing of Libya to the American boycott of French products at the beginning of the war in Iraq. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Pitched somewhere between just kidding and deeply affronted, this book from the veteran U.S. News Paris correspondent (and now contributing editor) systematically airs most of the complaints on both sides of the Franco-American equation, but with an exasperated jingoism that makes clear on every page where his loyalties lie. That heightened tone is part of the point, mirroring the heated, and mostly empty, rhetoric he finds has been bridging the Atlantic for the past 300 years. But Chesnoff's pro-U.S. J'accuse has a set of specific charges that include weakness during WWII, wrongness on Israel, collusion with terror from the 1960s on and oil deals with Saddam that, he says, drove recent French policy on Iraq. Threaded throughout his familiar and very broad stroke macropolitical analyses are micropolitical ones, as Chesnoff goes into great detail, for example, about the mechanics of his rural neighbor's concerted dislike of him (wryly noting that "it probably didn't help that I was a J-E-W"). The result is a kind of slapdash anti–A Year in Provence, drawing on a lifetime's anecdotes of étranger insult with a variety of untempered history lessons thrown in. (Apr. 25)

RICHARD Z. CHESNOFF is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report and a columnist for the New York Daily News. He is a former Paris-based correspondent for Newsweek and US News, and the winner of numerous journalism awards.

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