No comments about Tino Turtle Travels to Paris, France.

1 comments about Urban Crayon Paris: The City Guide for Parents with Children.

1. This book has all the details necessary to make an enjoyable trip with your kids to Paris. We visited Paris with our daughter and found the guide very helpful. There is a section which lets you select destinations for girls (or divas, as the guide puts it). There is a similar section for boys (or dudes), and for both girls and boys (co-ed). There are other sections like Playground Paradise (best playgrounds that children can hang around), beauty and the beast (for outdoor fun activities), etc. We had a wonderful time with our daughter, thanks to the guide. I'm hooked and I hope that others in the series are half-as-good for my other trips. All in all a dynamite of a book packed with loads of useful and parent-friendly information that I recommend very heartily.

No comments about Paris (Footprint - Pocket Guides).

1 comments about The First Time I Saw Paris: Photographs and Memories from the City of Light.

1. Everyone likes flipping through good photography books but this one you'll have to read. Aside from superb photography, Miller captures the soul of Paris in a way pictures of monuments never can. These Parisians look right into your soul -- and vice versa -- even before you read Miller's commentary. If you love Paris (particularly pre-McDonald's) you have to check out this book. Plus there's Miller's own poignant, amusing, self-revelatory look at an American GI in the postwar City of Light. Life is really about people, not monuments, and Paris is no exception.

2 comments about Above Paris: The Aerial Survey of Roger Henrard.

1. These gorgeous black and white images are so beautiful and vivid. These beautiful photo's shot from the fifties to the early seventies just jump off the page. You see some great Parisian buildings no longer extant, like Les Hales, or you see buildings like the Orsay train station in a state of disrepair before it was rescued and reinvented as the Orsay gallery. Paris is layed out so perfectly, it lends itself so well to arial photography. If you love Paris or appreciate amazing photography then you will want this in your collection. High recommended.



2. 
   Roger Henrard (1900-1975) was an industrialist, pilot and photographer. He flew over Paris in a single-engine plane and took thousands of pictures, many of them incredible pictures. Henrard used a high-speed plate camera to systematically document the city. This book selects 350 beautifully printed duotones from that collection organized by themes such as neighborhoods, the Seine, major buildings, the roads. Maps at the beginning of each chapter orient the reader, and Jean-Louis Cohen provides excellent captions and instructive essays, all in English.
   
   Henrad wrote UN ENRAGÉ DU CIEL ("THE FLYING MADMAN") (which has not been translated into English) describing his reconnaissance pilot experiences during World War II and why he explored Paris from the sky. Henrard was director of a factory of photographic instruments in 1930 and developed an aerial camera, which he started to use himself after learning to pilot a plane. His first flying observatory was a high-winged single-engine aircraft designed in 1932 --- a Farman 402, with a 120-horsepower Lorraine engine. Henrard called this plane an "optical and mechanical laboratory," using his own aerial camera system to take his photographs. He obtained a permanent flight permit from the Air Force and was able to devise a rigorous all-weather photography system.
   
   In 1948 he continued his flights in a Nord 1203 Norécrin (a low-winged aircraft derived from the Messerschmitt Bf 108), in which he installed the rapid cameras that he would continue to use for his aerial photography until 1972, three years prior to his death. In the preface to UN ENRAGÉ DU CIEL a wartime companion and novelist Jules Roy describes how the photographer used his "mechanical retina":
   
   "In cramped conditions and with the sun at his back, he takes his photos with all the precision of a fighter pilot performing a snap roll or a bombardier landing his crate in a vineyard. He calculates itinerary and arrival time, always picking out some makeshift airfield on which to crash should his only engine fail. Over Paris, for example, he is more or less sure of always being able to make a crash landing--on the Seine between two bridges, on lettuce and spinach plants at Gennevilliers, on the Vincennes rifle range, or on the glass roof of Gare de l'Est. And why not on the terrace of the Galeries Lafayette?"
   
   When Henrard took the photographs in this book, the city was still contained within the fortified walls built by Adolphe Thiers in 1845. Today's maps and city guides still show that asymmetric polygonal form. Henrard circled the city tirelessly, taking photographs by the thousand and surveying that classic shape and some of the encroachments of the city into the areas outside the walls.
   
   Henrard was not the first photographer to capture Paris from a flying machine. But his techniques were more rigorous and his artistic eye created great beauty while preserving cartographic accuracy. I've walked for at least 500 miles through the streets of Paris on business and pleasure trips over the years. It always seemed barricaded and crammed together from the sidewalk, brought alive from time to time with pockets of open space along the boulevards and near the Seine.
   
   This book gave me an entirely different vision of the city, and the essays made my imagination soar. This is a picture book with a brain and a soul.
   
   Robert C. Ross 2008

2 comments about Where to Wear, Paris, 2006: Fashion Shopping From A-Z (Where to Wear).

1. Great - need it for a trip to Paris!



2. Fun read for anyone traveling to Paris and also for the arm-chair traveler, Informative and helpful for more than just shopping.

5 comments about Best Buys and Bargains in Paris: (Yes, They Do Exist!).

1. This is a fun and useful book that has fed my many fantasies of traveling to Paris. When Jeanne Feldman writes of shopping for clothing in the "Fourteenth Arrondissement," you want to be there and see just what exactly the "Fourteenth Arrondissement" has to offer! Did you know that you can get a tax refund if you spend x number of dollars in a Parisian store? Feldman explains how this works, and much, much more.

   Paris is normally thought of as an expensive place to live -- and of course it can be -- but the author shows you how to circumnavigate this popularly conception of Paris. It may make an expatriate of you, as it apparently has of her.

   The book is divided into convenient chapters, so that whether you are eyeballing food, clothing, perfumes, supermarkets, wine, flea markets or more, she will send you to the right places once you read the right chapters. Because her prose is to the point, you won't be bogged down with unnecessary details. The book will fit conveniently into your day-pack or handbag.

   A satisfied consumer, Larry Fike )




2. I am not a shopper. My best friend put my feeling about shopping into words once, saying, "I regard time spent shopping as time that I am dead." Even so, I found the guide highly entertaining, very funny, and enlightening about cultural differences and similarities. I can see that it could be an invaluable guide for demon shoppers as well as phobic shoppers like me. I also like that it is so unapologetically idiosyncratic. Jeanne Feldman's personality comes through in the narrative -- very practical about getting a good deal and very astute in making observations about American and French ethos in the Agora.



3. From the very beginning of Jeanne Feldman's Best Buys and Bargains in Paris you realize that she is acutely aware of the cultural differences at play in France. Her advice is sure to make your shopping experience the pleasure it is meant to be and should appeal to everyone, from tourists eager to do a little shopping in Paris, to long-time expats who will certainly find some old and new favorites.



4. I didn't use this book at all. I found it disappointing. Instead of grouped by district it was grouped by category so if you were in a certain area it was hard to tell which stores were in that district.



5. As a frequent visitor to Paris and a dedicated schlepper I had high hopes when I read about some places that I didn't already know about in this book. Little did I know that 10 out of 12 places no longer existed and the 2 that did exist were extremely disappointing. I wasted many metro tickets, precious time in Paris not to mention the exhaustion/frustration factor. The author doesn't do her homework and the poor reader is the victim. I rate this book a minus 5 stars!

1 comments about Paris and Elsewhere (New York Review Books Classics).

1. This collection of Cobb's essays is another book in the NYRB series which I did not want to finish reading. These essays are about more than Paris or Normandy or even Europe; here is a record left by an Englishman who passionately loved a place, a bi-cultural historian and writer who grew his soul between the rare archived records of France and the living streets he loved.
   
   Richard Cobb has shown me that writing a memoir of place is a sensory experience. His essays are so rich in textured intimacy that I feel "le Cobb" is living still. One can find him strolling down an avenue observing every alteration of the weather, every change in the pavement, in the passersby, their clothing and language. I imagine Cobb still sitting in his favorite haunt, the late night and early morning caf?, sipping the 4:00 a.m. calvados, or apple brandy, as he watches the barges come up the river. From his youth, to his late travels, Cobb had found that one cannot write history without knowing the living. Le Cobb called himself a "prisoner of habit" (301), and this, I believe, is the key to the depth of detail in his writing. He frequented the same places, the same towns, kept in touch with the same French and Belgian friends. But there is also something exquisitely lonely about Cobb, the solitary observer, that appeals to the wounded romantic in every traveler.
   
   I'm concerned that the general reader will not pick up this book; the density of language in Paris and Elsewhere appears to be for the intimate specialist only. But the essays are about desire for a place, about human interaction in that space, how people create each other's lives, and the anger and grief one feels when a beloved city or village is altered forever--phenomena and feelings which anyone can apply to anyplace in the world. I highly recommend this book for people involved in city planning, the New Urbanists, any reader wondering why the French no longer wear berets, or any reader looking for a context or background as to how or why the recent riots and rebellions occurred across France in the past year.
   
   Cobb loved France enough to criticize the French particularly in the decades from the Baron Haussman in the mid 19th-century to Georges Pompidou in the 1970s when so much destruction was visited upon Paris in the name of `architecture.' Cobb shows that Brussels and Paris sustained more damage after World War II than before: "The damage which has been inflicted on these two cities is not, then, the result of enemy--or Allied--action" (200). In Paris distinctive neighborhoods were destroyed by the French themselves with no concern for how people's lives were being altered or the monoculture being created. Well, Monsieur Cobb, this vandalism to intimate dwellings, social settings, tiny restaurants, private gardens, the homes and boulevards of experience, is now a global condition. Thank you so much, Professor Cobb, for such beautiful writing on such a bittersweet topic.

No comments about Medieval Paris (Journey to the Past).

No comments about Private Diary of Travels, Personal Services, and Public Events, during Mission and Employment with the European Armies in the Campaigns of 1812, 1813, ... of Russia to the Capture of Paris. Volume 2.