Strong reporting and storytelling skills combine to make this
remembrance of Paris past a fine read. A Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, Karnow (Vietnam, A History, 1983, etc.) apprenticed as
a writer in postwar Paris, working his way up through the local
bureau of Henry Luce's magazine empire. His long dispatches were
generally filed away or, if published, cut drastically. But Karnow
kept his carbon copies; here he distills that 1,000 pages of
reportage into a memoir that artfully blends carefully detailed
immediacy with considered personal reflection. The first few
chapters, in which Karnow describes struggling as a GI Bill student
in Paris and his subsequent initiation into the character-filled
milieu of the Paris-based foreign press, seem somewhat
insubstantial; but they are really only the set-up for the series
of incisive reports that follow. Once past the requisite recounting
of encounters with celebrities (Audrey Hepburn dazzles, Ernest
Hemingway disappoints), Karnow uncorks a string of impressively
realized chapters devoted to a wide variety of topics. They include
le monde (a.k.a. the world of Parisian fashionables) and also the
demimonde of striptease artists, prostitutes, and criminals; the
intellectual circles of "the mandarins," and also the French
passion for car racing; the gastronomic divinations of the gourmand
Curnonsky, Christian Dior's reign over the fashion world, and the
strange career of Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, known as Monsieur de
Paris, the city's guillotine operator. All the while, Karnow
travels much further into French cultural history than his title
might suggest. He never fails to provide historical context; one of
his best passages retraces Ho Chi Minh's sojourn in Paris in the
late 'teens and early twenties, long before he bedeviled France as
leader of the Vietminh. Even the most jaded Francophile will find
much stimulation here - indeed, so will any fan of punchy prose and
intelligent observation and reflection. (Kirkus Reviews)
In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American.
Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance.
Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too.
A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.
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