Take a trip around Paris with me by reading Parisians
Parisians – the blurb
No one knows a city like the people who live there – so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb’s Parisians is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return to again and again – rather like the city itself, in fact.
First on the left, second on the right
What a treat this was. An appearance from a lost Marie Antoinette, an art tour with Hitler and even Napoleon popping his cherry. Parisians is as varied as Paris itself. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, it’s always fascinating and all true.
I would however have liked a little background to one or two of the stories. Whereas I’m familiar with de Gaulle, and the Nazi occupation, things like the student riots were new to me yet very little allowances for this were made. Even a couple of sentences indicating which direction we were heading to next would have been useful and wouldn’t have added much to the word count. It’s certainly a different take on a cities past, accessible to those less keen on dates and stone cold facts. You don’t have to be in love with the city of light to love Parisians. Although a certain awareness of its geography, its important events and its language certainly help you get more out of the book.
