About this title: Much of this memoir concerning Gopnik's five-year experience as an American in Paris was printed as the New Yorker column "Paris Journal," where it was the recipient of a 1998 George Polk Award and a 1997 National Magazine Award. With wit and insight, Gopnik relates the joys and difficulties of relocating his young American family to the romantic boulevards of Paris, where his expatriate dreams mingled with the realities of family life.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 10/2000
ISBN-13:9780679444923ISBN:0679444920
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 10/2000
ISBN-13:9780679444923ISBN:0679444920
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. Previous Owner's Inscription. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 10/2000
ISBN-13:9780679444923ISBN:0679444920
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 10/2000
ISBN-13:9780679444923ISBN:0679444920
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, In very good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House, New York
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780679444923ISBN:0679444920
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Price clipped. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: PAPERBACK
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN-13:9780375758232ISBN:0375758232
Description: Very Good. 0375758232 Copyright 2001 / light shelf wear to soft cover / cover looks different as shown / same ISBN / good clean pages / good or better condition. read more
""Just after the move, for my birthday, Luke and Martha gave me a wonderful toy, La Machine à Dessiner le Monde, a machine to draw the world. Really, all it is is a camera lucida, but nicely done in plastic, with a viewing stand on top. You put a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it.
All! For just tracing turns out to be the hardest thing of all. All the clichés and exasperating French abstractions about the insuperable difficulties of realism turn out to be plain truth when you have your machine to draw the world pointed out the window at the plane trees on the boulevard Saint-Germain, your pencil poised, and then you try to decide where to make the first mark. The world moves so much - shimmers and shakes like a nautch dancer, more than you can ever know when you're in it rather than looking at it. You bless any leaf that holds still long enough for you to get it. Hold still, you tell the tree, the light leaping up and down the balustrade, as though you were talking to a small child as you try to get on its galoshes. Just hold still. Where you finally make the mark is mostly a question of when you finally get fed up.
Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still."
Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York: Random House 2000), 255-6."
"I put this book down TWICE after the first chapter thinking that it was really boring and not so much fun. After a crisis where it was the only book around, I picked it up again and forced myself into that 2nd chapter. I think the editor did a real disservice by putting such a long forward and then the first chapter where it was- the book is a set of essays, somewhat linked and tied together, but perfectly able to be read as standalones. There are some insights in this book that I haven't read in any other Anglophone-expat-moves-to-France-and -writes-a-memoir (and there are a LOT of those books!). There are many laugh out loud moments and ironies that can really be appreciated by people who have experienced the people and ESPECIALLY the bureaucracy and way of doing things. The author is a little pretentious in his choice of vocabulary, but that's not really a stumbling block. I liked that he put words to many feelings that expats share- and did so quite poignantly."
"I can't say enough positive things about this book. Such intricate descriptions of such small things... you can savor it the way the French would want you to. It's a story of a beautiful life in a far away place-- but Gopnick tells it in a way that makes it so accessible (sometimes even ordinary) that he achieves an intimacy that I have not experienced in most books I've read. He also offers a social lens that is stimulating as well as enlightening.
I purposefully took forever reading this book because I didn't want my trip to France to end!"
"Yes, I realize this is getting cliche, but I am putting this book in my category of "Americans abroad." Even though I don't connect to the "isn't raising kids just a gosh darn trip" facet of this book, I think Gopnik is a fantastic writer and his observations about living in Paris and being American ring very true. What's also interesting is that because this book concerns the years 1995 to 2000 (that is Pre-Euro as the currency, Pre-Sarkozy) it is very interesting to see how much France has changed, especially the government rhetoric and policies surrounding organized labor and social security."
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