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Rating: 
Summary: super!
Review: i have enjoyed many of the travelers' tales books and the paris edition was no exception. it is a great companion to a regular old run-of-the-mill guidebook if you're preparing for trip to france.
Rating: 
Summary: deadly dull and almost entirely useless
Review: Nearly evenything in this book reads like rehashes of uninspired Paris tourist brochures. Even the three hatchet jobs contributed by Jan Morris and Herbert Gold (the insufferable, execrable, and virtually unreadable Gold contributed two) are derivative and unoriginal instead of witty and daring, as they were, no doubt, intended.Apparently it is virtually impossible to see Paris with one's own eyes. At least if you're an Anglo-Saxon foreigner. Major portions of the city have been, effectively, laminated and generously greased by the native French so as to slide foreign tourists through, and out, with the minimum of muss and fuss. And the editors seem to think that by excluding any significant mention of the Eiffel Tower that they are providing a novel and fresh take on Paris. But this constitutes a very feeble effort, at best. And apart from all the airy-fairy poetical musings that travel seem to provoke in travel writers, Paris also fills writers with cloying smugness. As the most extreme example, the one selection I could not finish was by someone called Lawrence Osborne, and it described Turkish baths. His mentioning of a "veritginous loss of toxicity" in the first, very long, paragragh was the last straw for me. On the upside, there are one or two glimmers of humanity and immediate, unpretentious life in these selections. But not nearly enough to justify ploughing through all 300 pages.
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