Claudine Monteil is a historian, biographer and women’s rights specialist. She has been active in the women’s movement since the 1970s. She is the author of Les Amants de la liberté. Sartre et Beauvoir dans le siècle and Les Soeurs Beauvoir. A former French diplomat, she held several positions with the United Nations, notably with UNICEF and UNESCO. She is the daughter of the mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre.

This is the first biography of Ève Curie, the daughter of the great scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, and the younger sister of Irène Curie, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ève Curie was the only member of her family who was neither a Nobel-Prize winner nor a scientist. But she was famous in her own right, as an author and concert pianist. Her most famous work, Madame Curie, a biography of her mother, was translated into more than thirty languages and became a worldwide bestseller.
After the Nazi occupation of France, she became an active supporter of General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, serving first as a war correspondent, then as a liaison officer and working tirelessly for U.S. entry into World War II. From then on, her life would become intimately interwoven with twentieth-century history. She met the most important political leaders of the time: Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Nehru. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, she was a special adviser to the secretary general of NATO — the highest diplomatic post held by a woman at the time.
She married the American diplomat Henry Labouisse, the head of the Marshall Plan mission, who would become U.S. ambassador to Greece and later director of UNICEF. She accompanied him on diplomatic missions to the numerous trouble spots of the post-War period, while at the same time working as administrator of the Institut Curie — a position that she held until her death in 2007, at the age of nearly 103.

• The first biography of Ève Curie, a well-known figure in the post-War period.
• In writing this book, Claudine Monteil had access to interviews and archives provided by the Curie family.
• This exceptional life story offers the reader a sweeping view of the post-War era, European reconstruction, the Cold War and NATO diplomacy.