Rating: 
Summary: get ready for a blissful love affair
Review: When I have gone to Paris myself I have found there are two ways to see the city. You can have a map and camera at the read and jaunt from sight to sight packing it all in or you can just grab a journal and start walking. The style of this book reminds me of those serene walks I have taken in this city.
Gopnik certainly lets his personal and political views be known but they were interestiing to me and it is all part of the experience of accepting new ideas when traveling. I also agree with his politics and respect him very much as a writer.
From the smells of the city, to the everyday sounds of the neighborhood, to the experience of dining in a strange new place I found myself inhabiting that lighthearted and almost dreamlike state I get when I go there myself. By the end of the book I had fallen in love with Paris all over again.
It is definately a 'day in the life of ' book. Not a lot happens. It moves at the slow relaxed pace of a Sunday parisian afternoon. Don't even try this book if you are an impatient reader. If you just like absorbing the local color of a beautiful and complex city...get your passport and start reading.
Rating:
Summary: A great book for the Francophile
Review: If you care at all about food and France, if you love taking journeys with your eyes wide and your ego well in check, you will love visiting Paris with Adam Gopnik.He is "your humble" narrator throughout, seeming to bumble through Paris, though with a great deal of insight and taste.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read
Review: Gopnik's Paris book is an incredibly enjoyable rumination
on childhood memories, culture at the end of the century,
conversation, food, neighbourhood beauty and the impermanence
of pleasure. If you are a fan of Paris, culture or just life in general, check this out.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth a read
Review: Being stuck on a long plane flight with this book was torture!
Rating: 
Summary: Does Paris to the Moon float?
Review: Things will only float if the weight of the water displaced by the thing is more than the weight of the thing. But if the weight of the thing is more than the weight of the water displaced then the thing will sink (Second law of Newton). I enjoyed reading Gopnik's book, being an expat myself (I live in Amsterdam --I am not American--) I could relate to some of the themes presented in Paris to the Moon. The book is not always entertaining, there are stories which are absolutely boring and lenghty and which have been better addressed by other authors (French culture, history, politics, etc). This placed a lot of extra weight on the book, bringing it near to the point of sinking. At times I felt like skipping entire chapters and not finishing the book but I did not. What kept me reading was the idea that this is Gopnik's experience as an expat, raising a child in Paris, adapting to a new environment, appreciating the micro and the macro. This is his account based on his perception of those events as they happened to him. Although I knew the end before getting there (very predictable) I wanted to read the book up to the last word. I wouldn't question Gopnik's views as I would not question Manet's interpretation of the world as he perceived it and painted it. The only thing I can do as a by-stander is appreciate it or not and take advantage of what I find to be useful. There is a lot of useful stuff in this book. In my view Paris to the Moon passed the bouyancy test, it does float.
Rating: 
Summary: A Superficial View of Paris
Review: This book was recommended to me since I used to live in both New York and Paris. I still live in France as a permanent resident and I have to say I was very disappointed. I think he was a bit of a pseudo-intellectual and his insights on the French were very superficial. I think part of the problem was that he lived in a very touristy part of Paris, favored by ex-pats. It took a little work to find an area untouched by tourism, and that was genuinely Parisian but it was well worth it. Also, being married and having children really changes your focus on life anywhere. I've lived in three parts of France as a student, single 30-something and now as a wife of a Frenchman and mother of two French children (the "King's Choice" too by coincidence). I was so looking forward to the part about the French birth experience. I found it a great way to tap into the attitudes of French women towards medical procedures, pain, childcare and body image. I can't believe he didn't include any of this. Did he not see the obvious or chose not to include it? These subjects alone could fill a book and interests people who have kids or don't. Early childhood education is another topic... I can forgive minor inaccuracies, such as the fact that his daughter can't be French by simply being born in France although he refers to her as such. After having every visa issued by the French government stamped in my passport, I wouldn't dream of claiming the generalizations that Mr. Gopnik does in this book based on his brief stay in my adopted country.
Rating:
Summary: I have savored this book
Review: I have never read anything which made me repeatedly laugh out loud over and over like this book did. And it was filled with many interesting insights into cultural things I am interested in--food, politics, etc. He also has a wonderful dry sense of the absurd. Will remember the Regiment Rouge and department store "theme" music for some time to come.
Rating:
Summary: a great disappointment
Review: Several people who'd previously visited France recommended this book. For many years now I have lived in France and, I must say, this book is unrealistic. Adam Gopnick is pretentious. His vision of life here has been clouded by his ex-patriot status, his US dollars, and a pampered life in a company-paid apartment in one of the most expensive areas of Paris. I was expecting a more realistic experience of life in France; this was a great disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Gopnik is better in small doses
Review: I read some of these essays when they were published separately as "reports from Paris" in the New Yorker. At the time I really enjoyed them; they were like chatty letters or phone calls from an old friend who had moved abroad. They made me want to go see Paris again. But put together in a single volume, Mr. Gopnik's essays come off as charming but very self-absorbed. Mr. Gopnik sometimes takes it into his head to make pronouncements about the Nature of Writing or Culture-with-a-capital-C, which are pompous in the extreme. So I'd summarize the book as entertaining but without anything new to say. Read one essay, then put the book down for a while before you read the next...just like the magazine chitchat they were designed to be.
Rating:
Summary: Paris to the zzzzzzz
Review: I bought this book on a whim, and have regretted it ever since. Adam Gopnick, the author, is such an elitist that it was hard for me relate with the different Paris he lived in. His stories were pretentious and so boring that I had to skip several sections to stop myself from burning the book. (I unfortunately, forced myself to go back to read the skipped sections.) The most redeaming parts were about his son and daughter and they save the book from getting just one star. Adam Gopnick is no Peter Mayle.
| 
