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.

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.

Good writer, not a good story. Ramblings about his love of Paris as well as beginning a family.

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.

Wealthy American Yuppie's view of Paris, with the usual wealthy American Yuppie's angst about Americans' gaucheness.

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.

Couldn't finish - read Almost French instead.

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.

Great memoir about life in Paris in the 90s by an insightful writer.

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.

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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five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries.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.

In 1995, the magazine The New Yorker selected Adam Gopnik for a dream job. Go live in Paris for five years and write essays about being an expatriate in the most romantic and logical city in the world. This books collects the essays. I think anybody who has been an expatriate would be interested in his observations of the street scenes, restaurants, and shops. He speaks the language like a native, which gives him the ability and authority to deal with the French on more or less equal conversational terms, though he wisely observes that we breathe in our native language but have to swim in our second one. He also makes intelligent points about cuisine, sport, and bureaucracy. Worth reading, but one a time lest the occasional posing ("aw shucks, just a down-to-earth guy dealing with the sophisticated, by golly") may weary.

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.

I own this one~ Have not read yet~

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