The Passion of Roland Garros

Collection "NRF".

Fifth edition.

"For the vast majority of people in our modern world, Roland Garros rhymes with Tennis, but few know that he was a courageous aviator, a lieutenant in the French army during the First World War, but also the inventor of the mechanism allowing to fire through the propeller's rotation field for combat aircraft. Jean Ajalbert paints a portrait of a new man, as he calls him. A man who loved France so much that he gave his life for it. Ajalbert's text is lyrical; it sweeps us away. It makes us want to be part of this French adventure while an entire generation of soldiers sacrificed themselves for the homeland. With great poetry, he tells us about the misadventures of a Roland Garros who never gave up, never threw in the towel, even during the long years of imprisonment in Germany. Ajalbert reminds us how much we need heroes around whom we can gather, commune, thrill, and make the homeland, our nation, this beautiful and grand life project, this shared vision that makes us stronger. Ajalbert, a friend of Garros, speaks of him with mastery, with emotion. Let yourself be carried away by the words, let yourself go to the vertigo of aerial combat, whose details and sensations he so elegantly narrates."