Paris to the Moon - ISBNLookup.com

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Many Americans are smitten by the allure of an expat's life in Paris, but few of us go so far as to indulge that fancy. In 1995, longtime writer for The New Yorker Adam Gopnik did just that, however, taking his wife and infant son along as he followed in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, Berenice Abbott, and so many other restless Americans of the past century who have made their way to the City of Light. Gopnik recounts his experiences in this terrific book.

Le Point Magazine

Without doubt the most influential translator of French culture to the United States.

From The Critics

Who wouldn't want Gopnik's job? Take your family to Paris for five years, watch your infant son become fluent in French, spend your days eating and drinking and interviewing chefs and fashion models, then write up an occasional report for The New Yorker. Gopnik's collected essays about his five years in Paris are filled with delight. While predictable in his appreciation of Parisian beauty and charm, Gopnik is several cuts above many others writing about Europe's romantic appeal. Gopnik knows cuisine, haute couture, politics and sports, and he uncovers larger cultural truths through simple domestic experience. His comical effort to join a Parisian health club, where women on treadmills move at window-shopping speed, leads to his realization, "The absence of the whole rhetoric and cult of sports and exercise is the single greatest difference between daily life in France and daily life in America." An elegant stylist and master of metaphor and description, Gopnik's observations are incisive and original. Such as when he links his feelings about his first delectable meal in Paris, when he was a teen, to those of Stendhal after his initial visit to a brothel: "I knew that it could be done, but I didn't know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it." Some might find Gopnik's touch too light, too boureois, perhaps even too self-satisfied. Still, this is an eloquent book about an American's romance with Paris, that seductive city which lures us in, yet excludes us from its inner circles.
—James Schiff

Publishers Weekly

In this collection of 23 essays and journal entries, many of which were originally published in the New Yorker, Gopnik chronicles the time he spent in Paris between 1995 and 2000. Although his subjects are broad -- global capitalism, American economic hegemony, France's declining role in the world -- he approaches each one via the tiny, personal details of his life as a married expatriate with a small child. In "The Rules of the Sport," he explores the maddening, hilarious intricacies of French bureaucracy by way of a so-called New York-style gym, where his efforts to become a member encounter a wall of meetings, physical examinations and paperwork. Many of the entries, such as "The Fall of French Cooking," focus on how Paris is coping with the loss of its cultural might, and look at others of the inexorable changes brought on by global capitalism. "The Balzar Wars" describes a mini-revolt staged by a group of Parisians (including the author) when their local, family-owned brasserie is purchased by a restaurant tycoon. Throughout, Gopnik is unabashedly sentimental about Paris, yet he never loses the objectivity of his outsider's eye. His "macro in the micro" style sometimes seems a convenient excuse to write about himself, but elegantly woven together with the larger issues facing France, those personal observations beautifully convey a vision of Paris and its prideful, abstract-thinking, endlessly fascinating inhabitants. Although the core readership for this book will most likely be loyal New Yorker subscribers, its thoughtful, funny portrayal of French life give it broad appeal to Francophiles unfamiliar with Gopnik's work. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In fall 1995, Gopnick, an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker, moved to Paris with his wife and young son, Luke. His reports from the city, published regularly in the magazine, proved to be fluent and witty, delightful fodder for anyone who loves Paris or has ever dreamed of living abroad. Those pieces, collected here, constitute more than a memoir of one American's struggles to adjust to French ways (though Gopnick was not completely out of his depth, having lived briefly in Paris as a child). True, the essays take the intimate and everyday as their genesis, covering, for instance, Gopnick's attempts to sign up at a "New York-style" health club, taking Luke to puppet shows and the carousel, visiting the new Bibliotheque National or the "dinosaur museum," struggling with French Christmas tree lights, and fighting to keep a favorite restaurant alive. But these are just starting points for deeper reflections on what it means to be French, to be American, and simply to be alive at the close of the 20th century. Gopnick's essays do what the best writing should do: they inform as they entertain. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Alain De Botton

[T]he finest book on France of recent years. . . . The distinctive brilliance of Gopnik's essays lies in his ability to pick up a subject one would never have imagined it possible to think deeply about and then cover it in thoughts . . .
—New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A talented essayist for the New Yorker pens a love letter to the City of Lights, praising Paris to the moon (though that's not the original meaning of the title).

Seattle Times

Gopnik is an artful reporter, dapper in his prose, sharp in his sense of absurdity. . . .

Entertainment Weekly

Magisterial.