Adam Gopnik: Paris to the Moon

By MARGIE THOMSON

A writer of intellectual depth, with a passion for the contemporary and for the buzzing of life and politics, Gopnik has for many years been a writer for New Yorker magazine.

In 1995 he, his wife and their infant son left New York to live in Paris, the city not only of their dreams but of many American writers before them.

It seems that Gopnik can turn his writing hand to practically anything - industrial strikes, the Papon trial, the splendour of French bistro cuisine, the Parisian kindergarten system, the limitlessness of French bureaucracy even in the face of a labouring mother-to-be - and can emerge with a finished product that is both desperately simple yet always sophisticated.

This, for instance, on the legacy of Auguste Escoffier: "Escoffier's formula for food was in essence the same as Jasper John's formula for dada art: Take something; do something to it; then do something else to it."

A wonderful portrait of a city, and also of a man and his family.

Vintage

$27.95