Helpful Score: 6
Gopnik wrote for The New Yorker, and this narrative of five years living in Paris with a small child is very much in The New Yorker style - which is to say, scattered among the punditries one finds some marvelous details. I still love Paris - and so does he.
Helpful Score: 6
Good writer, not a good story. Ramblings about his love of Paris as well as beginning a family.
Helpful Score: 5
An American couple and their infant son leave the familiarty of New York City to live in the glamour of Paris. The story is revealing and often humorous as they learn to manage in a foreign city with a new language, new customs and adjust to being new parents. Gives the reader an insight into the daily life of Americans in Paris.
Helpful Score: 4
Wealthy American Yuppie's view of Paris, with the usual wealthy American Yuppie's angst about Americans' gaucheness.
Helpful Score: 3
I found this book rambles on a bit too much for my taste. At the end of the day, I couldn't finish it. I have lived abroad and traveled to Paris twice, so I was expecting interesting insights into Expat life. I had heard wonderful things about this book, but found it to be disappointing.
Helpful Score: 2
Compiled from articles in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik describes his childhood experiences in Paris and his return to the city years later with his wife and children. Sometimes funny, sometimes touching, the chapters are amusing, poignant and real for Francophiles or anyone with any interest in cultural exchanges or the City of Light.
Helpful Score: 2
A delightful book. Gopnik is a talented writer and so even if I didn't like Paris, I would want to read it. I couldn't stop chuckling while reading the essay about his efforts to find a health club.
Helpful Score: 2
I agree with the Philadelphia Inquirer this is a must read if you ever visited or want to visit Paris.
Helpful Score: 2
I read this while visiting Paris and desperately missing my 2 year old, and realized that I was staying on the street on which the author lived while writing it. But, regardless of my situation at the time, I loved this book! Adam Gopnik brings a fresh wit to the experience of being an American (well, actually, he's Canadian) in Paris. My very favorite part was his tourings of the taxidermy museum and his son's love/hate/fear relationship with the place. I highly recommend it.
Helpful Score: 2
Fantastic little book! Part political memoir of the US and France in the 1990's, part food rant, part young family life. Just a pleasure.
Helpful Score: 1
Wonderful look at what it's like for an American couple to move to Paris - right before the woman gives birth.
Helpful Score: 1
Great memoir about life in Paris in the 90s by an insightful writer.
Helpful Score: 1
Fun reading for Francophiles
Helpful Score: 1
I really enjoyed the beginning of the book. It just dragged on and on after that. I didn't finish it, but I enjoyed what I read.
Helpful Score: 1
Insightful and touching, great book.
Helpful Score: 1
A feeling of understanding of the French way of life from an American point of view. This author is able to compare the differences of everyday life and appreciates the aesthetics of culture the French employ everyday. He is sometimes sarcastic to a point where I laughed out loud over some silliness. He was pleased to give his children an experience in France but remains an American. Great read.
Paris to the Moon let me be an armchair tourist to the City of Love where I spent a winter holiday a few years back with my boyfriend, now husband. Gopnik's memoir let me reminisce about and gave me new perspectives to places we did and did not visit. Gopnik's insight into the character of the city and his witty comparisons of modern French and America cultures on a both a global and personal level, provided me with a very enjoyable read. I appreciate how he brings to light misunderstandings the two cultures have of each other. I could hardly put it down.
Couldn't finish - read Almost French instead.
In 1995 Gopnik was offered the plush assignment of writing the "Paris Journals" for the New Yorker. He spent five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries. A self-described "comic-sentimental essayist," Gopnik chose the romance of Paris in its particulars as his subject. Gopnik falls in unabashed love with what he calls Paris's commonplace civilization--the cafés, the little shops, the ancient carousel in the park, and the small, intricate experiences that happen in such settings. But Paris can also be a difficult city to love, particularly its pompous and abstract official culture with its parallel paper universe. The tension between these two sides of Paris and the country's general brooding over the decline of French dominance in the face of globalization (haute couture, cooking, and sex, as well as the economy, are running deficits) form the subtexts for these finely wrought and witty essays. With his emphasis on the micro in the macro, Gopnik describes trying to get a Thanksgiving turkey delivered during a general strike and his struggle to find an apartment during a government scandal over favoritism in housing allocations. The essays alternate between reports of national and local events and accounts of expatriate family life, with an emphasis on "the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." Gopnik describes some truly delicious moments, from the rites of Parisian haute couture, to the "occupation" of a local brasserie in protest of its purchase by a restaurant tycoon, to the birth of his daughter with the aid of a doctor in black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front. Gopnik makes terrific use of his status as an observer on the fringes of fashionable society to draw some deft comparisons between Paris and New York ("It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones") and do some incisive philosophizing on the nature of both. This is masterful reportage with a winning infusion of intelligence, intimacy, and charm. --Lesley Reed --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Series of journalistic essays on life in Paris from Gopnik's personal point of view.
I really looked forward to reading this book before my trip to Paris. I wanted some insight into how Americans viewed living in Paris and all I got was an entitled brat's view of why the French are not like Americans. Well, aren't we glad??? Good grief, why in the world would you move to a country (especially such a romantic and delightful city like Paris) and whine about how 'different' things are from home. If you want to live like a New Yorker, stay in NY. I was disappointed in how little Gopnik truly embraced the lifestyle and culture of Paris, and how he still gives Americans the tag "Ugly American". Don't waste your time reading this; there are many more delightful books on Paris.
I own this one~ Have not read yet~
