Paris in the Fifties [Hardcover]

Stanley Karnow (Author), Annette Karnow (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1997

In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American. Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other.

Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance. Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too.

A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful chronicle of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Years before winning the Pulitzer Prize for his definitive history of the Vietnam War, Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow lived in Paris as a young reporter. The man who was later to be renowned for his thorough research and crisp prose had to begin somewhere, and Karnow had the incredible good fortune to make his way as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine in the 1950s. His original dispatches to Time's New York office make up a majority of Paris in the Fifties.

By simply calling this collection Paris in the Fifties, however, Karnow has done himself a great injustice. His treatise on the City of Light is more a biography of a city and its culture than it is a mere look at a time and place. Ever wonder where the modern-day restaurant had its origin, or what happened to the French aristocracy after the ravages of the Revolution, or even how the French maintain their status at the forefront of culture--be it food, wine, art, or fashion? Karnow provides the answers and then some. His descriptions are as rich as they are comprehensive, all the while depicting how the French savoir vivre--the zest for life that Paris symbolizes for all of us--withstood the horrors of World War II and the destabilization of society as everyone knew it. This wonderful book is reassurance that no matter what modern threats to culture may come, toujours Paris: we'll always have Paris. And that is true comfort to any expatriate at heart. --Courtenay Kehn --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Pulitzer prize-winning author Karnow (Vietnam: A History, LJ 10/1/83) vividly chronicles his early years in Paris, where he worked as a young reporter for Time magazine (1950-59). Displaying a broad knowledge of French history and civilization, Karnow offers anecdotes ranging from a description of the construction of the guillotine to a report of a disastrous automobile crash at the racetrack at Le Mans in 1955. He astutely illustrates the contradictions in the national character?how the French pose as individualistic, honest, open-minded, and tolerant but can be simultaneously extremely conformist, narrowminded, bigoted, and hostile to foreigners. Karnow closes with the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958 and the recall to power of Charles de Gaulle. His entertaining book will have enormous appeal to anyone interested in Paris and France, especially those fortunate enough to have lived in that great city in their youth. Highly recommended.?Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Times Books : Random House; 1st edition (October 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812927818
• ISBN-13: 978-0812927818
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #510,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why are the French the way they are today? Read background., November 10, 1998

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[e-mail] (Urbana,IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paris in the Fifties (Hardcover)

Chapter 15 on the youth of France is worth the price of the book alone. Times were hard in the 1950s and Karnow knew it and wrote about it. "What do we want? A decent life and I don't know how to attain it", says a 27 year old worker whose wife also works and together have a very limited life. What do the French think about food, work, wine, sex, intellectuals, language, fashion, Coca Cola? It is all here in this delightful book and it is not what Americans think. Yes, it is a report from a foreign country.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent recounting of France (not just Paris) in the 50s, September 1, 2003

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Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paris in the Fifties (Paperback)

The title of this excellent book is a misnomer. Although there is a great deal about Paris, the book as a whole rambles over much of France and even the Mediterranean. Beginning in the late 1940s when Karnow first went to Paris on the GI Bill to study and through much of the 1950s when he served with TIME in their Paris office Karnow lived in Paris. This book is a distillation of his memories and notes he kept from that period. Karnow, however, gives himself free rein to range over a host of topics, sometimes delving into French history, if it helps illuminate his topic. The result is a very personal view of France in the fifties. There is a great deal he doesn't discuss, such as French cinema and art in the decade. He writes of some of the literary figures, but not with any especial emphasis.

The range of topics that are covered in the book are not encyclopedic but they are exceptionally varied. He will write about wine, food, crime, famous politicians, infamous politicians, housing, French manners, Algerian patriots, people he knew, and a host of other subjects. Some of the chapters could be anticipated, such as a long chapter on French wine and a tour through the French wine districts. Some are unexpected, like a chapter on a man who was the last in a line of hereditary executioners. There is a good deal of name dropping (folks like Samuel Beckett pop in for brief cameos), but not too much. He writes of people whose names remain famous, like Christian Dior, and of many others, especially colleagues, whose names are not so well known.

One of the best things about the book is that while it may not give you all the facts about Paris and France in the fifties, it definitely gives you a feel for the time itself. It is also fascinating for what it reveals about the politics of the time. Karnow worked for TIME, which espoused a conservative Republican point of view (though more moderate than what would later characterize the late 1950s NATIONAL REVIEW), while Karnow himself was a liberal. In much of his political writing, therefore, one gets a sense of his take on one things on the one hand and the take of his employers, looking over his shoulder, on the other. The book therefore indirectly tells the story of how much of America felt about France during the fifties.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested either in the years following the war or in France or Paris in general. It is entertaining and informative at the same time.

I'd like to add that the photograph on the paperback edition of the book (and I supposed on the dust jacket of the hardback) is one of the most remarkable I have ever seen of Paris. A couple somewhere in Paris (the angles make it look to be somewhere east of Montmartre) looks over Paris with Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower off in the distance.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Paris Since '45, July 9, 2000

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A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paris in the Fifties (Paperback)

I really enjoyed this book. While I won't go over the top and give it a five-star rating, I found it a fascinating look at both French culture and Europe immediately after WWII. The title is a bit misleading - the stories Karnow has to tell are not Paris-specific ans much as they are France-specific. The cultural landmarks one might expect - painters, writers, musicians,filmmakers - expats and natives alike - modernists who filled up city up after the war, during the '50's are notoriously absent, despite the interview-appearances of John Huston, Audrey Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway.

Karnow was a stringer for Life Magazine during the '50's and was widely dispatched during his tenure. Rather than a history specifically about the city and its culture during the Eisenhower-era, this book is an omnibus of cultural information - the history of the guillotine, café culture, visits with the crown-princes and princesses of Hollywood, and the beginnings of Algerian resistance to French rule.

Karnow's done a fine - and sometimes gripping - job of creating a *petit-histoire* keyhole for us to view his Parisian decade through. While it didn't necessarily cover the bases I had hoped for - (e.g. George Orwell's 'Down and Out in Paris and London')- it filled in a lot of the gaps that lead to the student uprisings in 1968. This book may or may not be for the French-cultural novitiate or for those seeking reprisals of Goddard films, but Karnow's account of Paris - his personal narrative - freights its own reward.