Cover of Dawn, Dusk, or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy

Dawn, Dusk, or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy

An enormous success in France and a media sensation around the world, Yasmina Reza's Dawn, Dusk or Night will startle English-language readers with its utterly unorthodox (and candid and witty) portrait of a man in his quest for ultimate power. In 2006, Yasmina Reza, the most celebrated playwright in France, asked Nicolas Sarkozy a simple question: Would he allow her to spend the next year with him and his team as he campaigned for the French presidency? His response was an unqualified yes. To the alarm of his advisers, and the consternation of many of her friends, who feared she was making a pact with the devil, she picked up her notebook and her pencil, and off she went.

Read more

It is not enough to say that she was an observer of Sarkozy's rise to power. Rather, hers is the account of a brilliant woman of letters dancing in orbit with the most powerful man in France. Their casual exchanges, her remarkable insights, their phenomenal experience exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Through the greenrooms, bus rides, and flights, along the campaign trail; in strategy sessions and at meetings with heads of state;, in all hours of the day and night, they develop a relationship that knows no parallel, bridging the arts and politics, abiding within a purely intellectual sphere without judgment, conflict, or competition.

The groundbreaking Dawn, Dusk or Night defies genre to offer a spellbinding look at the interplay between two formidable champions bound by intellect and nation.

Setting
France
Audience
adult
Length
medium · 208 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Dawn, Dusk, or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Dawn, Dusk, or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. The Peninsula Shares France, french
  2. A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia Shares politics, nonfiction
  3. American Sucker Shares nonfiction, memoir, biography
  4. A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi: The Ideal Guide to Sounding, Acting and Shrugging Like the French Shares France, french, nonfiction

“People who read Dawn, Dusk, or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy tend to reach for these next.”

  1. The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World
  2. Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism
  3. The Age of Shakespeare
  4. The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

“If you want more of the same (politics), start with these.”

  1. Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom of Power
  2. The Strange Death Of David Kelly
  3. Politics: Between the Extremes
  4. Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron

“If it was the France that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Life is Short and Desire Endless
  2. Forever Valley
  3. French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French
  4. We'll to the Woods No More

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years
  2. The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House
  3. Gerald R. Ford
  4. Writers and Their Notebooks