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Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS
Simon and Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 5, 2011
Featuring: Julia Child; Paul Child
555 pages
ISBN: 1439163529
EAN: 9781439163528
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
Bestselling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning
account of Julia and Paul Child’s experiences as members of
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East
during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were
caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and
behaved with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating
portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were
recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform,
and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote outposts
in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced
6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly
golf-playing California girl who had never been farther
abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she
joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia
volunteered to be part of the OSS’s ambitious mission to
develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia.
Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of Kandy,
the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the
supreme commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in
the glamour and intrigue of her overseas assignment and
lifealtering romance with the much older and more
sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into the
jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on
educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to
build war rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality.
Conant uses extracts from his letters in which his sharp eye
and droll wit capture the day-to-day confusion, excitement,
and improbability of being part of a cloak- and-dagger
operation. When Julia and Paul were transferred to
Kunming, a rugged outpost at the foot of the Burma Road,
they witnessed the chaotic end of the war in China and the
beginnings of the Communist revolution that would shake the
world. A Covert Affair chronicles their friendship
with a brilliant and eccentric array of OSS agents,
including Jane Foster, a wealthy, free-spirited artist, and
Elizabeth MacDonald, an adventurous young reporter. In Paris
after the war, Julia and Paul remained close to their
intelligence colleagues as they struggled to start new
lives, only to find themselves drawn into a far more
terrifying spy drama. Relying on recently unclassified OSS
and FBI documents, as well as previously unpublished letters
and diaries, Conant vividly depicts a dangerous time in
American history, when those who served their country
suddenly found themselves called to account for their
unpopular opinions and personal relationships.
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