Rating: 
Summary: Experiencing Paris
Review: I read this book during a week's vacation in Paris. Adam Gopnik's humorous and insightful description of life in Paris helped me to experience my time in Paris with more fullness than any guide book could ever do. The ordinary became alive with meaning such as the story of competing brasseries I would have walked by without any notice. The extraordinary took on new perspective such as a strike that crippled the operation of the Eiffel Tower's elevator. Reading this book allowed me to feel more like a resident of than a tourist in Paris.
Rating: 
Summary: I can take it no more...
Review: Based on the reviews I was excited to read this book. I thought I could learn a little about Paris, and it sounded interesting and funny. What I learned is that Adam Gopnik loves to talk about himself and his hip New York City/Paris life, but it is by far not interesting to read. I never stop reading books, but this one is painful and pretentious. Can I get a refund?
Rating:
Summary: I'm tired of reading this
Review: Not knowing this is a book of collected essays, much about French history or the French language this book is hard to get through. Being of average intelligence and in love with Paris, I still did not find this interesting. Most reviews claimed it was a touching and insightful take on Paris but I thought it was cold and too involved in its analysis of Parisian life and even worse it did not tell me anything. I was left with questions unanswered about the writer's experience. I also tired of the comparisons of New York v Paris. Not having lived in New York I don't understand how it is to live there, you might as well have been comparing any two foreign cities.
Rating:
Summary: Takes you to Paris, no matter where you are now
Review: Gopnik's insights are as rich and rewarding as some of the meals and experiences he describes on the streets of Paris. Sometimes the most profound ideas he pulls together come upon you all at once like a delightful streetscape one encounters turning a corner. If you want to be anywhere but where you are now, or are thinking of going to Paris, this is a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: Would like to give 4.5 stars
Review: Paris-to-the- Moon is insightful, gently self-deprecatory, and right-on for American observers of the often confusing dynamics of Franco-American interaction. Adam Gopnik is terrifically insightful and delightful as a Parisian companion -- my next trip to the City of Light will be indescribably enriched for the experience of seeing it through his eyes (if only to ensure that I have dinner at the Brasserie Lipp!) The book lost a half star in my estimation only because it seems (perhaps in the rush to publish the book in time for the holidays of 2000, when the original source material was completed only months earlier?) that perhaps it could have used a bit more editorial attention -- there are several cases of prose that could have been de-tangled and anecdotes that were repeated, rather than referred to thematically. But read it -- it will be like finding a new lifelong travel companion!
Rating:
Summary: transcends genre
Review: I had read and enjoyed most of Adam Gopnik's New Yorker articles written from Paris, and though this book is largely composed of those articles, seeing them collected together (with some additions) makes them more than they were spread out over years. More humorous, more insightful, more moving. As journalism (even New-Yorker-style literary journalism) they were, for me, most memorable in their observations on French culture and life. Collected together and added to, the pieces emerge as memoir. The journalism facet prevents the memoir facet from ever turning to navel-gazing, while the memoir puts the information contained in the journalism into human perspective, showing why one might care about French food (even if one doesn't particularly like to eat it), or making cultural difference seem somehow more real, more graspable in its treatments of French gyms and childbirth practices. This is a work of tremendous stylistic and intellectual depth, but also one that is enjoyable from the first page to the last.
Rating:
Summary: An enjoyable tour de France, filled with wit and good prose
Review: If you enjoy reading about cultural differences, and a good essayists exploration of a subject from a variety of perspectives, Goptnik's collection will provide a few good evenings of exploration. As someone who loves France, and has spent considerable time there, he does a good job at taking Paris' pulse, and exploring what makes the City of Lights tick differently than the rest of the world. His writing does an outstanding job of unmasking a culture that, for many American's, is difficult to understand when viewed from our own frame of reference. One has to admire Goptnick for landing one of the all-time great jobs...go spend time in Paris, while sending back dispatches to the New Yorker magazine. Goptnik joins a short list of writers including Hemingway (A Moveable Feast) to M.F.K. Fisher (Long Ago In France) and Louis Malle (A Year In Provence) who pull back the French curtains and do an wonderful job of helping us understand a country and its' people, and we learn that they are deliciously different from ourselves. Read, and enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: best consumed in small portions
Review: I remember liking Gopnik's "Letters from Paris" series when I still subscribed to the New Yorker in 1996. This book, frankly, is a disappointment. Although parts of it was still enjoyable (he's good at the craft of writing -- often witty on a sentence-level, and technically strong (I liked his use of the parallelism in A Tale of Two Cafes)), in a book form, some troubling characterstics show through more than his New Yorker pieces. He is fond of trying to turn small daily details into some deep metaphor about the cultural differences between NYC & Paris; but more often than not, the attempts seem forced and unreasonable. Either he was willfully, pretentiously trying to be deeper than his experiences afforded him, or perhaps he was just a lost foreigner who misunderstood his environs a lot. In terms of actual insights, this book offers no more than the same sort of thing one would expect to hear from a college student returning from her study-abroad program (granted he expressed them in a more entertaining fashion). From a human perspective, I think that Gopnik was cruel for making his very young child adjust to unfamiliar countries (twice!) just to satisfy his own vanity/childhood fantasy. I find his constant attempt at trying to fit in, trying to become more "Parisian," (and failing) rather pathetic; though in an odd way, it makes a rather moving American tale (immigrants trying to fit-in in the US).
Rating:
Summary: A Really Fun Read
Review: Adam Gopnik originally published these insightful and funny essays when he wrote from Paris for "The New Yorker." In general, his voice in these essays shows both amusement with the French and great admiration for their everyday culture. Here's a quote that captures the point of view of this wonderful book, as well as Gopnik's direct and elegant style. "Paris is marked by a permanent battle between French civilization, which is the accumulated intelligence and wit of French life, and French official culture, which is the expression of the functionary system in all its pomposity and abstraction...There is hardly a day when you are not wild with gratitude for something that happens in the small shops...And hardly a day when you are not wild with dismay at something that has begun in the big buildings, some abstraction launched on the world in smug and empty confidence." Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Lapidary, insightful, witty
Review: As I read Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon", I was frequently reminded of that other English language advocate of French sensibilities, Cyril Connolly. Gopnik shows much the same erudition, wit, and ability to use a single incident as a peg for a discourse on something somehow as large as humanity itself... even while being unpretentious and "light" in the best sense of the word. It isn't just the observations such as how he couldn't understand why the French were befuddled at the idea of a call from a "New Yorker" "fact checker" until he thought about how Americans would react to a call from a "theory checker"... It's also how he blends the love of *both* countries. It's how his son provides not just the usual, "Here's something adults don't see," but also, "I've only ever lived in Paris, and here's something you as an American don't see." On the whole, an excellent work, and I eagerly look forward to seeing more from Mr. Gopnik in the future.
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