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Summary: What a joy - and I'm a Gallephobe!
Review: Gopnik is a wonderful writer, and his love of Paris, his wife and his son come through. It's hard not to like him because he acknowledges his Achilles heel and quirks.
The his description of his son in his stroller in the Paris department store is a good example of just what a fine writer he is. He shares not only the physical image of his son (a cobra in mittens, I believe), but lets us experience his feelings for his young child. Paris to the Moon is on my shelf next to Speak, Memory, by Nabokov (a great passage in there about looking at the lawn through different panels of stained glass!)
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Summary: A great, and timely, read!
Review: In this thoroughly charming collection of related essays, Adam Gopnik has rendered the contradictory impulses of the modern, well-educated émigré. Thoroughly American, he nonetheless has a lifelong love of France and French culture. Raising his son and bearing a daughter with his wife during a 5-year stay in Paris, he comes to feel that he will never be totally comfortable in either world. He finds that this will be doubly true for his son, returning to his birthplace after spending his most formative years immersed in Parisian daily life. In these writings Gopnik does a superb job of skewering the uniquely French capacity for abstraction, particularly in the bureaucracy of the State, and consequently also the uniquely American worship of the concrete and absolute. He leaves it to the reader to conclude that there are things none too pretty about both cultures, as well as things of great worth. That these cultural differences may be at the root of the current trans-Atlantic friction will not be lost on the thoughtful reader - nor will Gopnik's delicately-crafted reminders of the things that those of us who have spent time in France have come to love about the French people. The writing is gifted, and the prose has a cadence that nearly creates a meditative state. Highly recommended, particularly for those drowning in cynicism.
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Summary: It's A Waste of Money!
Review: This guy is just so full of himself that it makes you want to hurl this "waste-of-money" book into the nearest trash can! How bad is it? Real, real bad - so bad it makes you wonder how this awful thing ever got published. The endless gushing about his precious little kids and the odd selection of topics (transportation strikes?) make this one easy - leave it on the lower back shelf where it belongs.
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Summary: if we were all so lucky
Review: This book was an entertaining escape that probably speaks to most of us who would love to spend 5 years in a fantastic foreign city raising our young child/children. For the average person this is fairly unlikely but if you can't do it at least you can read about it. Yes, he lives a luxurious life but personally I enjoy reading about the things I can't afford to do (even when I do manage to get to Paris). It has high points and less high points but I found it to be one of my favorite reads. Although America is a great country there is something terribly refreshing about the idea of bringing up kids in an entirely different environment. And as the daughter of a French mom I found many of the insights to be rather amusing. And remember, this is just Paris, not all of France.
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Summary: A wonderful book about cultural interchange...
Review: I just want to thank Adam Gopnik for this wonderful book. I am a passionate consumer of travel books and more precisely of essays that tell stories of people confronting their own views of things, their own cultural backgrounds with those of the new culture they are visiting, and how that experience helps them grow and mature in their own lives (I highly recommend "The Road to Santiago" by Cees Noteboom). Mr. Gopnik succeeds in writing a very enjoyable book, capturing all the sensuality of Paris life by disclosing the pleasure of everyday things in a way only a witty-intellectual foreigner person could do.
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Summary: Book to the bottom of my pile of dirty laundry
Review: The WORST book I've ever read. I bought it originally to share a unique feeling you get from visiting Paris. The only thing I could share with the author was the need to sell this book. His stories were pretentious and so full of arrogance, I couldn't follow along. He talks about streets and hotels that only the rich have seen. Unless you've been there, you feel excluded. He certainly is no Peter Mayle. With Mayle's books, you yearn to visit his world and do what he's done. With Gopnick, you physically yearn for the book to be over. I can't remember how many times I put the book down in disgust or how many stories I half-finished to hopefully find one more interesting. However, guilt was the only reason I ever finally finished the book, and I'm so glad that I've gotten rid of it today. It was a waste of time and of money. I would recommend you buy twenty copies of Mayle's books. You'll finish them all ahead of this one. (A little note--The question is not whether you agree with my review. It's whether it's helpful or not. Use that criteria when clicking above.)
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Summary: To the Moon, Paris...I mean Alice
Review: Gopnik's Parisian Moon must look like one of those ying-yang circle symbols. There is a lot of "he was neither kidding nor not kidding" (page 299) rhetorical flim-flam philosophizing. Parisians are exasperating and not exasperating, the moon is half-full/the moon is half-new. But somebody (an editor!) forgot to tell Gopnik that whether the glass is half empty or half full, it needs to be filled with one drink or else it confuses the sipper. He is bound to bore you with one or more of the chapters, in my case it started with the very first chapter, about a transportation labor strike. French political organizations were not what I was hoping to read about when I cracked open this book And, I don't mind the doting-father comments about what his child says and does but plenty of other reviewers found it conceited. I loved the sections on couture and cuisine, although other readers may like the chapters on soccer and baseball. I found the style and substance of this book to be along the lines of the occasional breathless, sometimes boozy type of email communications an ex-pat might write home to friends and family about the oddities and idiosyncracies of his temporary foreign home. The tone also needed to be reviewed by an editor before publication, as it leaps lot and sometimes crash lands. In addition, there was a lot of substituting of a foreign word here/there which is supposed to be interpreted on-the-fly by the reader, as, well, the writer is so immersed in his new culture he has temporarily forgotten the English equivalent. Some of the foreign insertions are obvious, some are not. This book was good but it was not good. I think Gopnik should have sent his editor to the moon in a fusil with a boring account of how the Transportation Union was on strike and could not replace the jammed landing-gear taped to the lever.
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Summary: Too much Parisian time of his hands
Review: Although Gopnik is quite a good writer, hence the 2 stars, this appeared to be written by a man with way too much time on his hands; a nice enough guy, whose main flaw is that he is utterly self-absorbed. Several of his essays are touching, others a tedious prattle about his children. He led such a little life in Paris, seemed bored by it all, and by way of using his life as a vehicle for representing the larger Paris, describes a Paris that is as dull as dishwater. The "New Yorker" apparently had underwritten this adventure and should have pulled the plug long before his 5 years. (He lived in one of the most expensive areas in Paris) He and his wife had no working life to speak of, therefore his extended Paris stay was very unnatural. He hung out. He did not engage in any real reporting or travel beyond his upper middle class circles. He actually described himself as a Yuppie. He eventually moved back to New York, to a life of "dinners and gallery openings" - please!!. I am now convinced that all the breathless quotes on the cover were written by people who had not actually read the book. The bookclub question guide at the end is an absolute hoot not to mention an added insult to the reader. For better insight into Parisian life, travel there for a week.
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Summary: Paris: from the Inside by an Outsider
Review: Living in Paris was the dream and wish of this author since he
first visited during his teenage years. It has been said, "once, you visit Paris, you must return ..." and much of the allure is based on the desire to relive the memories of the first meal ever consumed there, recalling all the tantalizing and delicious flavors that only Parisians can create. The book is essentially a 4 year memoir of living in Paris from the mid-1990s. The author is a writer for the New Yorker magazine, his wife a screenplay writer, who, along with their infant son, pack up and leave their home in New York, for the adventure of a lifetime. What I loved most about the book is how the author compares and contrasts American thinking, logic, and values with those of the socialistic, French, cosmopolitan view. The book is educational, literary, entertaining and occasionally amusing. The author's technique of interspersing French history and political outlook with current events and situations is particularly effective. The author writes with first hand knowledge about fashion shows held by the elite designers, the Parisian cuisine of the most well-established restaurants, reasons for some fo the strikes, the socialistic approach to healthcare, and even apartment hunting, explaining how & why the government owns apartments in the "best" neighborhoods, available only to highly elected officals. Of interest to me, was a chapter on the political trial of a government official who had been involved in processing the paperwork for Jews who were deported to concentration camps during World War II - the sobering past is never too far away. My favorite story was the "Balzar Wars" in which a group of restaurant regulars (well established customers) form an "association" to stand up for the rights of the waiters (garcons) when an restaurant tycoon buys this favorite restaurant of theirs ... The author describes favorite "haunts" of his such as museums, art galleries, parks near the Left Bank, and even how to maneuver through the red-tape of the "Bibliotheque National" (Naitonal Library). He also describes the favorite places of his son, who is around 2 - 3 years of age by then. Another charming story was his son's first "love affair" with a Parisian blond beauty, of about 4 years of age. There is just the right combination of intellectual discourse, creative description and chatty banter, to create a hihgly pleasurable reading experience. Erika B.
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Summary: About kids, not paris
Review: As a French minor and an enthusiast of the culture in general, I was hoping to discover some witty insights into the differences between French and American culture in this book. Instead, this book can be classified as a guide to 'bringing up baby' in a foreign country. This was not what I expected at all. Although Gopnik made a few humorous remarks, most of his observations amounted to complaining about Parisian life... finding an apartment, going to the mall, getting Christmas tree lights. I was also not pleased about the section referring to Gopnik attending his wife's visit to the gyno at the discovery of her second pregnancy. I was looking to escape to the 'city of lights' while reading this book, not to TLC's A Baby Story takes Paris.
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