Destinations

A Suggestion for Your Holiday Gift List: Paris Insights - An Anthology by Tom Reeves

Paris is for me an addiction. I haven’t been to Paris in four months, and I needed a fix, even though my business and bank account won’t permit one of my impulsive weekend trips. I found that fix recently when I read Paris Insights – An Anthology by Tom Reeves, a beautifully illustrated compilation of many of the best stories from the “Paris Insights” newsletter published over the last ten years by Discover Paris!

As a long time and regular Paris visitor, I find many of the numerous books published about the city repetitive and therefore a waste of my time.  But I have found in the “Paris Insights” monthly newsletter places, people, and pointers fascinating for even those of us who know Paris. Some of the best of these are in this slim “Anthology” (which can be easily slipped into your travel bag) and the accompanying photos uniquely invoke the people and places in the articles.

I admit it – I’m in love with Paris. In another life I was a writer living in the Fifth and probably hanging with Gertrude Stein and sleeping with Ernest Hemingway – really! (ok- I’m a bit crazy when this subject comes up). When I need a Paris fix, it permeates my life. If I hear the French language, or hear of a French movie or food reference my body reacts with a pang of withdrawal not dissimilar to the feeling a lit cigarette produced after I stopped smoking twenty years ago. Yesterday, walking down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, I followed a group of young men for three blocks just because I heard the phrase “Ah, oui! C’est ça!” and knew they were French.

So recreating the Paris experience between trips is for me important and necessary. I found what I was looking for in Paris Insights – An Anthology.

As I savored a glass of French Sauvignon Blanc, I floated into the book’s cover – a blue expanse of Paris sky sprinkled with puffs of pink cloud, with a filigreed Paris street lamp close enough to be touched in the foreground. Then, I read the articles.

As I read “A Dog’s Life, A Good Life” from 2006 and met Jane, Giovanna and Olivier and their dogs Rita, Matisse and Jimpy, I was reminded of the special relationship that the French have with their dogs and remembered fondly the big black dog (now deceased) that always sat on my foot as I ate at his owner’s restaurant in the Fifth Arrondissement.

I discovered in the article “Christian Churches in Paris” by Monique Wells that a church that has always fascinated me as I passed it on my walk up the hill from rue des Ecoles towards the Pantheon was named after Saint Ephrem the Syrian (who lived from AD306 to 373) and that the church’s parish consists of over 350 families of Syrian, Iraqi, Turkish and Egyptian origin and that Mass is celebrated in Syrian, Arabic, and French.

My mouth watered when I saw the cup of hot chocolate and chocolate-stained pitcher from which it was poured sitting on a silver tray with a small glass and tall carafe of water in the beautiful photo accompanying the article “Warming the Heart with Hot Chocolate” which described several of the best places to find my favorite nonalcoholic Paris drink, including a place I had not known about in the sixth arrondissement where “The walls of the cup have been 'painted' with the chocolate so that the cup resembles a chocolate tulip.”

I met people such as Juan Sanchez (who moved to Paris from Miami and opened a wine store and a restaurant, both in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter) and Jean-Paul Logereau (a third generation coffee merchant who is photographed tousle-haired, serious and intense, leaning against a deep vat of coffee beans in a cluttered work room near sacks of beans ) who through in-depth interviews taught me some things I had not known about the “number one difference between French and American wines” (see the article “Wining and Dining With Juan Sanchez”), and the world of coffee roasting and brewing (“Fresh-Roasted Coffee In Paris”), and I learned some new things about Sylvia Beach, a woman I thought I already knew intimately, in the 2004 article “Sylvia Beach.” (Sylvia was the founder of the original “Shakespeare And Company” bookstore, the friend of writers in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, and the publisher of her friend James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”)

Finally, despite my years and years of wandering the streets of Paris and discovering previously unknown places to savor, I found several I had not known about, described here with panache, depth and humor, and accompanied by photos that made me want to crawl through the pages. (One such place is the Church of Val-de-Grace, a little-known “remarkable church whose interior is so beautiful and sumptuous that first-time visitors cannot fail to feel a sense of exultation upon entering its sanctuary” accompanied by a close-up photo of the frescoed cupola, and another is the Publicis Drugstore on the Champs-Elysées.) I will make it a point to find these places the next time I arrive in Paris.

The pages of the original book have a soothing sky-blue background and all photos are in color. This version is now called the “Premium” edition, and can be purchased at www.parisinsights.com for $39.95. If you are on a budget, you can still read the articles accompanied by black and white versions of the same photos (except for the cover which retains the lovely colors found on the original), by purchasing the “Travelers’” edition, selling both at www.parisinsights.com as well as on Amazon.com for $16.95. I would strongly urge spending the additional $23.00 if you can afford it.

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