With his wife and infant son, New Yorker
writer Gopnik finds an apartment and settles into the City of Light as a foreign correspondent. Setting aside its frustratingly tangled bureaucracy, he embraces Paris unconditionally. Nuances and subtleties—like the fact that their Christmas-tree lights come in loops rather than strands—are his delight, and he bring listeners such wonderful observations as, "In America all appliances want to be cars, in Paris they all want to be telephones." The author's observations are as much about the art of raising a family in Paris as they are about the city itself: we witness, for instance, the birth of his daughter in a French hospital by a doctor in a black silk shirt unbuttoned to the navel. Gopnik's reading is wry and bittersweet with an acerbic and witty delivery reminiscent of David Sedaris's. Listeners will feel as though they've been transported to a Parisian bistro and are sitting with Gopnik over cups of café au lait. Based on the Random hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 25, 2000). (Feb.)
