The Twilight Years : Paris in the 1930s

Rating:
Summary: A Major Disaappoitment!
Review: I had such great hopes for this book and really looked forward to reading it. I could barely make it half the way through when I finally gave up. The prose is turgid with faulty syntax. I often had to reread sentences to make sure I understood what the author was trying to say. I was given the impression that he wrote with authority but found some of his statements and facts to be questionable. The 1930s in Paris deserve a better expose than this.

Rating:
Summary: Colorful yet flawed and slanted view of Paris in the 1930s
Review: The main characters are here: Stavisky, Daladier, Reynaud in politics, Sartre (very briefly), Picasso, Dali in the arts, Chanel, Coty, etc. Several rather minor artists, such as the photographer Brassaï, are also presented in an interesting, anecdotal fashion. So much space is devoted to James Joyce, Henry Miller and others, however, that it should really be titled "Expatriates in 1930s Paris." Numerous American preconceptions about the French are repeated. The book is also seriously compromised by the many mistakes in French ("C'est moi qui EST l'artiste," "pas DES histoires" -- The words "et" and "est" are not, as Wiser implies, pronounced the same) and by factual mistakes (The French Academy does not edit the Larousse Dictionary; The obelisk in the Place de la Concorde is incorrectly identified as 'Cleopatra's Needle'; Chaplin's the Great Dictator was not made in the early 1930s, etc.). There is such sloppy chronology, one wonders how much of the other details the author has simply invented, or embroidered.

Rating:
Summary: Good but brief review
Review: This book gives a brief review of life in Paris before World War 2. It covers James Joyce, Reynaud, Bricktop, Joesphine Baker and other. It should have covered more about foreign policy, and incidents such as the assassination of the Nazi diplomat in Paris and Munich. These incidents contributed to World War 2 and The Fall of France to the Germans in 1940.