The happy news is that Young's singular touch, as unique as Lubitsch's, has survived the Atlantic crossing and is flourishing in Paris. The Ernst Lubitsch reference is not used lightly. Each restaurant, each review, each meal, each recipe has its own scenario and is paced like a good movie. And the recipes are so good, your script will be guaranteed a happy ending.

The Paris Cafe Cookbook is book of meals to be made with love and shared with those you love and about a city that Daniel Young loves dearly.

This wonderfully written, beautifully photographed and illustrated hommage to the City of Lights is must for all who love Paris, and, by extension, all who love life.

As one reads through the book, the authors' love and appreciation of the city is evident. In Paris Reflections, readers follow six fascinating walking tours of the city and are treated to a treasure cove of information, the obscure as well as the familiar, from important dates in Africa-American history in Paris to profiles of colorful personalities who have lived and worked in the city. Well written and easy to read, Paris Reflections, Walks Through African-American Paris is a valuable resource for both travelers and non-travelers as well.

What followed was an afternoon of sheer delight, as I rediscovered some of the incredible beauty of this area, with the added bonus of a perspective of celebrated Black Americans from a different era. While their very haunts may have changed or even be totally nonexistent, the monuments and neighborhoods themselves are still intact, to be seen just as these personalities saw them.

I applaud the authors for what must surely have been a labor of love. One pet-peeve, however, is the lack of photos of the basic points of interest encountered during the walks. But, otherwise, the discovery process as presented in this book in this most beautiful of cities is worth the price of admission alone. I enthusiastically recommend this offering!

I first travelled to Paris in 1976, then a number of times thereafter, lately last May 2001. Each time, I strive to capture the essence of this wonderful city, and aside from a few character sketches, I don't have much success. This book is everything I wanted to take back from Paris in addition to some wonderful memories.

The format is a longer-than-wide book with excellent paper. The text is accompanied by good-sized watercolors and pencilled notes. It looks as if you are holding the actual sketchbook. The colors are very true; I do watercolors myself and I can tell you that the pages look as if the washes were just laid down. The look is fresh and really, it is stunning.

If you love France, Paris, art, watercolors, travel, you will love this book. I treasure it.

It's also a very entertaining page-turner that maintains strong reader interest in the explorations - interior as well as temporal - of the likeable and savvy (but somewhat hapless) scholar-adventurer Mark Saverra. A bare description of the plot might make it sound contrived, but the seams rarely show as the tale dips & soars like a kite in the unpredictable Mediterranean breezes. A nitpicker can find some copyediting changes that the author might have made, but we can always hear the salt water lapping at the rocks & smell the pines heated in the sun in this tale of enchanting women & indelible characters who are involved in Mark's discoveries and in the search for "Agamemnon's Sword" - a priceless relic that has somehow been spirited away from an archeologist's dig - or has it? An immensely interesting read, even when we're seduced by the shadows on the cave wall.

Plato's cave is a labyrinth within a labyrinth. Mentis's protagonist, Mark Saverra, is a quiet and scholarly classics professor at a small college, who falls into a series of intrigues and counterintrigues when he sets out to clear himself from charges that he has stolen a very valuable ancient Mycenaean sword.

He shuttles back and forth between his American campus to the archaeological digs in Greece. Saverra (like the author) is of strong Greek heritage and slips easily in and out of one culture, or the other, with ease.

A note of interest is that there are a large number of references to Greek legend and mythology that serve as a kind of literary trellis upon which grow the vines of the story. One of the many sensuous females that fall into Saverra's life (and bed) is even named Helen!!

Saverra is being shadowed by both good guys and bad guys, and it's hard to tell which is which, at times. Even his closest friend, as well as the erotic lovers he meets along the way, seem to be double and even triple agents as the quest unfolds.

So that I not spoil the story, I won't go into further detail here, but will say only that, whether or not the readers of this book are scholars of the Classics, "Plato's Cave" is a fascinating read.

Saverra, of Greek heritage, is swept into a cultural confusion of his own cultural heritage, of modern Greece and ancient Greece in search of the missing artifact, and to clear his name. There are many references to the classical world that meld into the modern, and the dividing line seems to bisect his very mind.

The placid scholar finds himself enmeshed into plots, intrigues and passionate sexual liaisons with mysterious women. Any scholar of classical Greece should find this book as fascinating as it is informative.

So, dear reader, beware! For should you open the first page of this book, you may find yourself swept away to a Paris you never knew of, to return to a present made a little sadder by finding there are no more pages left to turn.

I also recommend these other books by Rossant which I have read:
- Memories of a Lost Egypt (the first of her food memoirs)
- Bocuse a la Carte (translator)
- Colette Rossant's After Five Gourmet
- Colette's Slim Cuisine
- New Kosher Cooking
- Vegetable

Rossant's new book, Return to Paris, continues the story of her extraordinary upbringing. I really recommend reading both books, which are delightfully different but ideal companions. In fact, I so loved Rossant's evocation of Cairo in both writing and recipes, and her candid portrait of her family there, that I wasn't sure at first how I would react to her new memoir's focus on Paris, where she returned as a teenager. As it turns out, I enjoyed the dramatic turn this book reflects, in both her life and her culinary education, as she describes her difficult adjustment to postwar life in a country so different from her beloved Egypt. I was touched by young Colette's largeness of spirit as she accepts her losses and isolation, and opens up to the delights of Paris and its food.

Rossant is a wonderful writer with an explorer's personality, which makes her books transcend their genre. Lovers of good stories and good writing, as well as marvelous food, will enjoy Return to Paris. I'd like to add that given the events of our time, in particular the appalling anti-French and anti-Arab behavior some folks exhibit, it is compelling to read how one young person bridged two strikingly different cultures with grace, open eyes, and receptive tastebuds.