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Book Review: A Paris Notebook by C.W. Gusewelle — 10 Comments

  1. This one sounds interesting. I have a Jacques Pepin cookbook and he talks about nuts, mushrooms, berries, clams, crabs, all available for those who want to. His point that in France everyone would be out mushrooming, picking berries, picking up nuts from the ground etc.

  2. Gusewelle often gave credit to his editor for his creative and courageous assignments. The newspaper sent him to Paris for six months, to write these columns. He also sent him to Africa once, and the assignment went something like “Go where you need to go. Talk to whomever you need to talk to. Write what needs to be written. Come home when you get sick.” He went all over the world on similar assignments. He went up the Siberian Lena river clear to the source in the wilds, and returned to civilization just in time to witness the fall of communism in Moscow. Twenty years later he and his wife, elderly now, repeated the trip and reported on the changes. Those columns became a book “A Great Current Running.”

  3. This does sound interesting. I think most of the stories I read about France are written by people from the UK. I wonder if it isn’t as big of a transition for them as it is for Americans. I think A Year in Provence has mushroom hunting in it. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable eating mushrooms I collected, even if the pharmacist checked them out.

  4. I just love a Paris memoir too, this one sounds intriguing. It certainly does make a difference where the memoirist is from. There are a surprising number written by Australians moving to France, or living there for a while, and I really prefer those, I understand the author and their background much better than when I read about an American in Paris for instance. Still I’ve just tried to find this book, it’s not so easy from down under- but stranger things have happened, and I do hang out in used book sales often enough, perhaps I’ll come across it-there can never be too many Paris memoirs. I always have at least one looming in my TBR.

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  6. I liked “Paris to the Moon” by Adam Gopnik. And as a writer for The New Yorker, it’d please Kim Ukura over at Sophisticated Dorkiness.

  7. Pingback:Books on France Challenge — Wrap Up | Joy's Book Blog

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