Customer Reviews

Paris in the Fifties

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Having lived in Paris during the late 'fifties, I was immediately attacted to the Karnow book by its title. Upon reading the book, I wasn't disappointed. It was an easy read, partly because of the subject matter and partly because Mr. Karnow is such an excellent writer. The history lesson was great!!

I loved this book! I like reading books that create a lot of mental imagery and that give me a feeling of "being there". This book does both, and is a great little slice of history. I read it because I was yearning to re-read Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" but it was checked out of the library. I stumbled upon this instead and adored every page. Do yourself a favor, and take a read- you'll be hooked!

Karnow, with the succinct style of a journalist brings the reader Paris and its people extracted from his writings when he worked for Time Magazine's Paris bureau. He surely could have handed us a dry hit parade of his journalistic coups; instead he gives us insights into the Ville Lumiere and its people in a decade of healing and recovery following WWII. This book is alive. After reading it, you'll better understand why Thomas Jefferson called France every traveller's favorite country after his own..

...of time and place. Paris has been called, with much justification, the world's capital of nostalgia... and if one has been fortunate to have seen it when one was young and in love, well... And then it was the `50's, for some of us of a certain age, a decade that evokes nostalgia if you airbrush out the threat of nuclear annihilation, McCarthyism, the Korean War, the possibility of being stricken with polio at the beginning of the decade...

I first came by Stanley Karnow by reading his quintessential book on the American war in Vietnam Vietnam: A History, shortly after it was published in 1984... just barely enough time after the war to provide some perspective. Rightly, he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. Scholarly and authoritative, Karnow cut through so many of the myths surrounding the war in ways that I had not seen done before by a "mainstream" journalist. Paris in the Fifties was published in 1997, and given his literary pedigree, and my Francophile nature, it was an essential read.

And there is much to like if you are willing to just sit back and enjoy the times. Like many Americans of the post Second World War era, who followed their predecessors after the First World War, Karnow explained how they flocked to Paris to live in the excitement of the "city of light," in often limited financial circumstances. This book is a collection of 21 vignettes, based on his dispatches to Time Magazine. However, as he says in the Preface, the stories appear in "greatly revised form," so for me, the most fascinating part would have been the how and the why of the revisions, which, of course, you're not offered.

As one would expect from a reporter who lived in France for a decade, there are articles on gastronomy and wine ("In Deepest Beaujolais.") A facet of the political system is covered by an article on Pierre Poujade, whose name would be lent to a movement of small shopkeepers and others who felt they were being left behind (Sarah Palin and the Tea Party?). He also devotes stories to French Guiana, the last man to operate the guillotine, youth, society's elite, and the crime beat. Karnow broke the news about the disaster at the Le Mans 24 hour auto race, when racers crashed into the crowd, killing 83 spectators. Naturally there is also a story on the French intellectuals who inhabited the cafes along St. Germaine; his article takes its title from one of Simone de Beauvoir's novels: The Mandarins

But I had some major disappointments. One of the classic defects of a journalist's memoirs is the over injection of the comings and goings of the journalist and his friends, set against this "exotic backdrop." There is far too much name dropping, and precious little insight into how the country works. He mentions the working class neighborhood of Belleville, that supplied so many supporters to the Commune, but do a story on it? No. Rather the tourist's familiar beat of St. Germaine. Karnow, who writes the classic book on the Americans in Vietnam was in Paris when Dien Bien Phu fell, ending the French involvement. There is really nothing on how this impacted the home front, or the military. His story on Ho Chi Minh, "Ce Petit Annamite" could have been downloaded from Wikipedia; it contained no personal insight, but was only a familiar regurgitation of his life, and then only to 1923! The Algerian War of Independence started in the same decade; his coverage is not insightful there either, and conveys little of the anguish of the struggle. Some of Karnow's historical formulations are skewed, to say the least. For example: "By July 1954 Premier Pierre Mendes-France had achieved peace in Indochina..." A strange peace indeed, the peace of the vanquished. And: "Tunisia had been a rich Roman province before its conquest by the Arabs..." What? What happened to the Punic wars, not to mention the occupation of North Africa by the Vandals after the fall of Rome. Several hundred years are missing in Karnow's statement. Did Tunisia go down hill after the Arabs got a hold of it? And there is the matter of all that un-translated French which might cause annoyance to the non-Francophones. (But it really is your fault, if you don't understand... I think Charles de Gaulle said that).

Enjoy the nostalgia, and ponder how four decades might change your perspective. Since is IS Paris, I'll round up to 4-stars.

I should have loved this book.

I love travel memoirs, memoirs of life in foreign countries.

I love Paris.

I love journalism memoirs.

This is a memoir about being an American journalist in Paris during the fifties.

But the fact remains that I didn't love it.

I liked it well enough, and there were many moments I found interesting and engaging. I particularly liked the moments of engagement with writers and filmmakers. It was a nice look at the Paris of the time.

I'm not sure why it didn't work for me as well as it could have-- I think it may have something to do with the pacing and tone. At times it zipped around, and at others I couldn't muster an interest in the subject matter and found myself flipping ahead.

This seems to me a nice summer reading book, with a focus on the casual reader. If you're interested in the subject, you may well enjoy it more than I did. I feel it's only fair to tell you that it appears most people who read it enjoyed it more than I did. So give it a chance.

(p.s. I didn't feel as though the illustrations did much except give it a dated feel, but tastes do vary.)

A lively and vigorous memoir about the life and times in Paris, France and the Mediterranean.

Added bonus: excellent drawings or sketches by Karnow's wife Annette.

Kudos to Karnow's wife #1 for roughing it out in the USA.

I've been to Paris twice. This is a very accurate representation of the one of a kind Paris culture. Excellent stories and personalities. Every second of this book was enjoyable. The only drawback was the difficulty to keep track of the personalities sometimes, other than that, one of the best ever!! A rareity..