Dr. Sumner Jackson was a hero in the most basic sense, a person who performed life-saving acts with little regard for his own safety.

He is one of a number of remarkable Americans highlighted in Charles Glass' fascinating history of Paris during World War II.

Nearly 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris before the war, including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Josephine Baker. When war broke out in September 1939, at least 5,000 ignored U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt's advice to leave.

They remained even after Hitler's forces occupied the city in June 1940 and by the time Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, approximately 2,000 Americans -- artists, intellectuals, black musicians, businessmen -- remained.

Glass, a former journalist, has written a lively account of the moral and political quandaries and increasing privations under German occupation. He skillfully uses memoirs, diaries, letters, documents and official records to draw a picture of expatriates caught in a mesh of deceit, bravery, self-sacrifice and fear, and places them in the context of diplomacy and the wider war.

A surprising number of Americans remained free for most of the occupation. The author concentrates on a handful of people and their associations, including Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous bookstore Shakespeare & Company, which she determined to keep open while aiding Jewish friends and resistance fighters.

It would be hard to overstate the courage of Jackson, chief surgeon at the American Hospital, or that of his wife and teenage son. Besides keeping a vital medical facility operating, and out of German control for four long years, he and his family frequently risked execution in enabling the escape of scores of downed Allied airmen and the passing on of information.

Bullitt was brave and resourceful, so highly regarded by French authorities that they asked him to negotiate the surrender of Paris as an open city, thus making him its unofficial "American mayor." After the occupation, he left Paris and arranged a commission in Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces. At 53, he fought with them until the liberation of Paris in August 1944.

Glass summarizes their post-liberation fates. Beach closed her shop when she was interned for several months and did not reopen it upon her release (although another bookseller took it over later at another location.

The Jacksons were arrested only weeks before the liberation of Paris; father and son were sent to slave-labor camps. There is enough suspense in their stories that you should be left to discover their fates yourself, but they were not uniformly happy.

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