Parisians An Adventure History of Paris [Paperback]

This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction, of the lives of the great, the near-great, and the forgotten.[Robb] has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere....His bookargumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dareis as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water.Robb, in employing the techniques of the novelist, animates his characters mainly for 'the pleasure of thinking about Paris.' That pleasure is also the reader's.Robbs stylish and stylized tale of the town turns you into a sightseer, visiting the past, uncovering what time has hidden and observing anew whats there. Its a tantalizing tour. Robb wanders but is never lost.With his profound knowledge of Paris . . . Robb reveals a city of not only lights but darkness, which, though discovered, remains unknowable and alluring.A creative montage of how history, individuals, and geography intersected at key moments in Paris.Ingenious...Marvelously entertaining, boundlessly energetic and original...This book is the sort of triumph that we have no right to expect to come from anyone in the steady way that Robb's masterly books come from him.A superior historical guidebook for the unhurried traveler, and altogether a book to savor.Graham Robb's new book is so richly pleasurable that you feel it might emit a warm glow if you left it in a dark room. Essentially it is a collection of true stories, culled from Robb's insatiable historical reading and lit by his imagination. He has the passion of a naturalist displaying a wall of rare butterflies or a cabinet of exotic corals, but his specimens are all human and walked the streets of Paris at some point between the French revolution and now...[A] generous and humanel“'