In Chanel’s Riviera, Anne de Courcy has written a well-researched and compelling story. She maintains a remarkable balance between, on the one hand, Chanel and her world of the rich and famous and, on the other, the lives of ordinary people desperately struggling to survive in a country on the brink of annihilation. Drawing on an immense volume of material, she has succeeded not only in constructing an intriguing portrait of Chanel herself but also in expertly conjuring the two very different worlds that then existed side by side.

De Courcy juggles an immense cast of characters. In the book, aristocrats, politicians, artists, writers and movie stars show up for cameos on the Riviera and then depart. Except for the politicians and the artists, the participants in that extended bacchanalia are forgotten today, and De Courcy is generally unsuccessful in bringing them back to life ... This book is an odd account, not quite biography, not an in-depth discussion of fashion and not a comprehensive history of the place. Much of the material has been written about before. But De Courcy’s book is entertaining, and it satisfies the need for a peek, at once envious and satisfyingly censorious, at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Anne de Courcy claims that her book Chanel’s Riviera is neither a biography of Coco Chanel nor a history of the Riviera, but it certainly reads like a biography of this glamorous part of the world that continues to capture the imagination ... De Courcy’s sparkling, anecdote-rich narrative takes a darker turn with the onset of war ... Drawing on fresh evidence, De Courcy, whose previous books include a biography of Diana Mosley, reveals testimony from Jews hidden from the Germans, sometimes at great personal cost. Chanel’s murky dealings with the Germans is deftly handled.

For today’s real estate-obsessed, much of Anne De Courcy’s retelling of the characters, events and properties of the French Riviera in the 1930s reads like a Sotheby’s International catalog punctuated with Page Six-style rundowns of who’s sleeping with whom and banal descriptions of what F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described as 'the diffused magic of the hot, sweet South' ... Although sketches of Chanel’s life, specifically her fashion inventions and her love affairs, are woven throughout the book, she is not the only icon whose habits are chronicled in meticulous detail (making it slightly odd that her name is featured so prominently in the title) ... intoxicating descriptions ... The second half of the book describes in equally meticulous — and gruesome — detail the deportations and persecution of Jews, and the struggle of many along the Côte d’Azur, including Chanel’s architect, to hide Allied prisoners and detention camp escapees in their villas, and then to help them find other safe houses or couriers. That’s the problem with this meandering, occasionally repetitive account: The awkward juxtaposition of the Riviera’s high-society decadence and the gruesome atrocities of the war is difficult to reconcile.

De Courcy doesn’t judge her subjects, but seems deeply familiar with them, describing scenes with such confidence and intimacy the reader is practically viewing them through a peephole. Even for relatively minor characters, we learn vivid details about topics from their landscaping to their scandalous entanglements ... The mix of humor and horror can be discombobulating, along with the piecemeal narrative: One character is introduced with a chilling prophecy about her fate, for instance; we don’t hear more until the prophecy is fulfilled more than 100 pages later. Still, we are warned of this approach early on: De Courcy states in her prologue that she did not intend to write either a biography of Chanel or an account of the Riviera, but to just tell the story of the years when Chanel summered there. It’s a framing device of space and time, making for a fascinating kaleidoscope of a story—one that works because of the glitter of each individual piece.

Chanel’s Riviera is best when it remembers Chanel, the Riviera and the pervy excesses that characterize both ... De Courcy offers choice gossip about many...and paints vivid images about how this playground for the rich adjusted when World War II dropped off its calling card ... Chanel emerges as a fascinating and contradictory woman. Plenty of biographers have tried and failed to figure her out, so it’s a smart choice for De Courcy to depict the designer/perfumer’s competing impulses and admit that she’s un-figure-outable. I enjoyed Chanel’s Riviera but, too often, it’s about neither the creator of the little black dress nor her adopted home. De Courcy offers some surprising specifics about the impact of war on the Riviera...but she gets distracted by war stories that have nothing to do with her topic, devoting chapters to the Vichy government and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Paris. It’s disappointing, too, that Chanel’s Riviera is not illustrated.

This detailed social history uses copious name-dropping and gloriously gossipy text to highlight Coco Chanel’s considerable influence on the south of France during the 1930s, providing insights into the decadent lifestyles and extravagant fashions favored by glamorous visitors to the Riveria. De Courcy...is adept at describing displays of opulence, and proves equally capable when portraying the deprivations and reversals of fortune occasioned by the onset of WWII ... This will be popular with royal watchers, fashionistas, and readers who relish the international social scene, and should cover new territory for most.

... readable ... is less a study of Chanel than a snapshot history of the Riviera from 1930 to 1953, the years that the creator of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5 maintained her elegant, 10,000-square-foot home outside the town of Roquebrune. Chanel, in fact, disappears from the narrative for long stretches, as Ms. de Courcy fast-scrolls through the Côte d’Azur escapades of a rich cast of characters ... Ms. de Courcy missteps, however, in recounting a supposed episode in which Chanel was kidnapped from the Ritz...The author gives no source for this story, and it seems unlikely given its striking similarity to the well-documented arrest of Chanel toward the end of the war by two members of the French Forces of the Interior, the loose band of resistance fighters, soldiers and ordinary citizens who had taken up arms in a rampage of revenge against the occupiers.

A gleaming social history ... Quotations from period diaries and letters enliven the narrative, though the overall effect is light and gossipy ... At times, the author fetishizes the bygone glamour that characterized the landscape ... The unavoidable disjuncture between Chanel's privileged world and the one just outside it leads to a somewhat uneven narrative that will turn off many readers but appeal to those fascinated by the rich and famous. In its copious details, this lovingly researched portrait of paradise highlights the colorful glitz and too-familiar blindness of the ultrarich.

... a dishy and well-researched account ... De Courcy describes the impact of anti-Jewish laws and food shortages on those who remained in the region, but lets Chanel off the hook for her anti-Semitism and her affair with Nazi intelligence officer Hans von Dincklage, who helped to insulate the designer from wartime deprivations. Nevertheless, this fluidly written history succeeds in capturing the era’s intoxicating mix of glitz and grit.