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Book reviews for "Spolter,_Pari_Dokht" sorted by average review score:

Eating and Drinking in Paris: French Menu Reader and Restaurant Guide (The What Kind of Food Am I? series)
Published in Paperback by Open Road Pub (01 April, 2001)
Authors: Andy Herbach and Michael Dillon
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Recommend with Reservations
76 of the 123 pages are menu translations, French to English, and the vice versa so you can ask for what you want or translate what they have; all this very helpful and in a light, compact easy to carry book that makes it worth taking. The "Ten Simple Rules of Dining in Paris" in the begining along with the introduction comments are very good, they will serve you well to help make eating in Paris less stress free. The 25 pages of eating place recommendations is of less use, considering how many there are in Paris this is a very small sample. Near the Sacre-Coeur their recommeded cafe turned out to be a shabby affair with curious looking characters hunched over their rundown tables, which sat directly accross from a more relaxed less rundown place that we felt more comfortable eating at, which had fine food. You have to decide for yourself.
The book is worth taking with you. Paris is thick with places to eat, making it easier to just duck in anywhere with this wonderful little guide to manners and translation. Don't rely too much on the recommendations as the only places to eat at. It would have been nice if they had included a few paragraphs about the different types of wine.

Try lunch instead of dinner
This is the third time that I used this book while on vacation in Paris. I actually used the previous edition on my last two trips in 2000, and used this edition for my most recent trip in September 2001. The book is worth the money!

When I got to Paris, I made my way to some of my favorite restaurants and obviously started using the menus. This time, it was much easier to understand the selections. I remembered the definitions of a lot of the menu items from the previous two trips (using the book) and so understanding the menus and ordering the food was relatively painless this time. Yes, I actually improved my French vocabulary by using the book during my last two visits! The book is not exhaustive; however, I would say that at least 75% to 80% of the words on most restaurant menus are listed and defined.

I was so happy about my success with the menus that I decided to give some of the restaurant tips in the front of the book a try (pages 19-51). Now you have to understand that I never visit restaurants listed in guidebooks - EVER! I think that we tried three of the restaurants that were listed in the book and we really liked them. There weren't a lot of tourists in these restaurants and the food was pretty good.

I would like to make a comment about the best restaurants in Paris (page 29). Yes, it is very difficult to get a dinner reservation at these places -- I usually call about one month in advance. However, I almost always can get a lunch reservation at one of these restaurants without much difficulty. If you are dying to have dinner at a specific restaurant and you can't get a reservation, then try to have lunch there instead. I planned our last trip at the last minute and so I was not able to call restaurants ahead of time from the USA. When I arrived in Paris, I tried to call for dinner reservations and got the usual "complets" (full) on the other end of the line. Then I called and got a lunch reservation at L'Ambroisie with no problem! We waltzed in at about 1:00 pm, sat at a great table in a beautiful room and had a wonderful three-hour French lunch. The restaurant said that the lunch and dinner menus were the same (on that day) and so I did not feel that we had a lesser dining experience. This was confirmed when we were presented with the $300 check for lunch for two at the current exchange rate of 7FF/$1!

I highly recommend the book. It will save you a lot of time and trouble while using French menus. Also, you can try the restaurant recommendations and still feel as if you had an authentic French dining experience! I would also recommend their guidebook for Spanish-speaking countries.

Now I know what I'm ordering!
I got this book as a gift. It has tips on restaurants, bistros and wine bars in Paris. The largest part of this book is a menu reader that explains what you are ordering on a menu in France. What a tough job these authors had! Exploring food markets and restaurants must be hard work. But seriously, this guide sends you to restaurants with good food and reasonable prices.


Goodbye for always : the triumph of the innocents
Published in Unknown Binding by Hudson Cove Publishing (1997)
Author: Cecile Kaufer
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Through the eyes of a child...
This book is a well written, easy to read, account of two little girl's experiences during WWII and their struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of France. Because it is written through the eyes of the girls as children, it is not laden with a lot of adult scenes that are often painful to read when studying written works of the Holocaust. Even so, its story is poingnant and leaves a lasting impression. Cecile's parents and their love live forever in this book. I highly recommend this book. I plan to include this book as part of required reading for history in my son's homeschooling program.

This book will keep you reading
This book tells you about the horrors of World War 2. Cecile was a heroic young girl who had lost her parents and older sister but had to try to keep her and her 6 year old sistr alive. This book made me appricate what I have that she lost. It was a sad book that keeps you reading.

This is the kind of book that will keep you reading
In this book Cecile wrote about the horrors of World War 2. She was only 11 when nazis invaded her home,her town,her country,and many others. She was a very heroic young girl who lost her parents and older sister. But had to try to keep her and 6 year old sister alive. This book made me appreciate all the things I have that she lost. It was a sad book that keeps you reading.


Hemingway: The Paris Years
Published in Paperback by W.W. Norton & Company (01 May, 1999)
Author: Michael Reynolds
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The True Story of A Moveable Feast
Michael Reynolds's Hemingway, The Paris Years is the second volume of his five volume life of Hemingway. Reynolds's takes pains in his introduction to thank and praise Carlos Baker for his Hemingway biography, but Reynolds's work has become acknowledged as the greater of the two. This volume deals with Hemingway's Paris years from 1921 to 1926, the same period that Hemingway describes in his short memoir, "A Moveable Feast."

The twenty-two year old Hemingway is newly married to his first wife Hadley and has been advised by his American literary mentor, Sherwood Anderson, to go live and work among the writers and artist of Paris' Left Bank expatriate pack.

Reynolds present Hemingway's Paris years in detailed chronological order. He occasionally goes into greater detail than is appropriate for good story telling but the book reads for the most part like a novel. Hemingway takes a trip to Italy to visit his WWI haunts in Milan and the riverbank where he was wounded. Hemingway's early work as a reporter for the Toronto Star takes him to some of the major political events of the 1920's. He interviews Mussolini mere months before he seizes power in Italy and attends a 1922 Genoa conference that is eerily similar to the 2001 Genoa conference. He takes exciting bullfighting trips to Spain wherein the development of Hemingway aficion for bullfighting is well described. The details of Hemingway's climb up the literary pecking order are made clear. He is being referred to as the best young American novelist by friendly critics years before he has published a novel.

The painstaking process by which Hemingway fashioned his early, classic short stories is described in you-are-there detail. The pugnacious Hemingway picks fights with perceived rivals, both with fisticuffs and with his writing. The long and difficult negotiation by which his first publisher, Boni and Liveright publish his first widely available book, "In Our Time," is well described. It seems that "In Our Time" was published almost more as a favor to Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway's other literary fans than on it's own commercial merit. Hemingway's dissatisfaction with Boni and Liveright's efforts for him is described as well as Fitzgerald's efforts to bring Hemingway to Scribner's. Hemingway writes the short satiric novella "The Torrents of Spring" to force Boni and Liveright to break their contract with him and then gives his first real novel, "The Sun Also Rises, " to Scribner's.

The book ends with Hemingway on his way home to Paris from New York in winter 1926. He has successfully broken his contract with his first publisher and signed a new contract with Scribner's.

I sometimes feel sorry for the biographers of great men. In this case, the subject, Hemingway, lived his larger-than-life life to the fullest, grabbing all the gusto, having his adventures and love affairs while the poor biographer is trapped in his academic cocoon, poring over old papers, scribbling in notebooks, devoting his own life to writing about someone else's life. Such is the lonely world of biographers. Those thought aside, "Hemingway, The Paris Years" is a one fifth of monumental achievement by Reynolds and a must read for any fan of the great man.

Excellent, Fair, Entertaining
Mr. Reynolds continues his bio of EH with the writer's first marriage and Paris years of the early 1920's. Reynolds is excellent in his narrative of EH's developing literary career. The trial and errors of the early stories, the rejection and success of getting the stories published is well told. EH's social life in Paris is well analyzed. Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound are part of EH's life for short periods that EH makes the most of. His life as a reporter and editor are well told too. His life as husband and father is secondary to his work as a writer. Mr. Reynold's skill as a biographer has improved since the first volume. He is less judgemental and lets EH's nasty side reveal itself thru incident rather than excessive criticism. A first rate bio.

Extremely well done
This book is wonderfully (and obviously pain-stakingly) crafted. It reads like a novel, but it illuminates Hemingway's personality through subtle, and not so subtle, touches. This is an excellent telling of the early years in Paris and Toronto and of how Hemingway taught himself to write. I especially enjoyed the details of the Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford relationship regarding the Transatlantic publication, and I also enjoyed learning better what Stein gave to Hemingway's writing -- but overall I enjoyed the book evenly from start to finish. This book can stand alone. It was the first one in the series that I'd read. I look forward to reading the others.


Left Bank
Published in Paperback by 1st Books Publishing Company (18 January, 2000)
Author: David Lee Colgrove
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I couldn't stop reading, even at two in the morning...
"Left Bank" was a wonderful find! I love thrillers and Colgrove's book didn't disappoint. It took about eight pages to hook me. The author writes in such a visual style that you can easily picture yourself in France.

This one has everything I want in a thriller: Suspense, Sex, Exotic locales and an involving plot filled with great characters.

I hope there will be more "Paul Manning" novels!
Paul Manning is an appealing, action-oriented character who is stuck in an impossible situation. I lost track of time whenever I sat down to read about his dilemma. When reading "Left Bank", I was transported to the streets of Monaco and Paris along with Paul Manning. The ending was great and I want more!

Curl up in your favorite chair-you won't put this book down!
David Colgrove takes us to the darker side of the "City of Lights" in this interntional thriller. The suspense builds upon itself from the first chapter until the last page. From beginning to end, this plot driven, involving, psycholological and political suspense read, is a page turner! If you enjoyed Nelson DeMille's latest, great book, "The Lion's Game,", you are the reader who will love running with Paul Manning through the streets and alleys of Paris.


Literary Cafes of Paris
Published in Paperback by Starrhill Pr (1989)
Author: Noel Riley Fitch
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Great Companion for Your Paris Guide Book
This wonderful little book makes a good companion for whichever Paris guidebook you plan to carry. It not only lists many interesting Cafes to visit, but also gives interesting background information on the famous writers and other celebrities who once hung out in them. It gives you an excuse to visit parts of Paris you might not otherwise visit. Great book.

A must read for the intelligent visitor to Paris!
I stumbled across this little gem a few days before my wife finally dragged me to Paris in 1991. Lucky for me! Thanks to this work, we have come to love Paris, especially the Left Bank. Away from the tourist throngs, the reader can people watch and sip for literally hours reflecting upon Hemingway at the Brasserie Lipp, Picasso at the Cafe de Flore, Shirer at the Brasserie Balzar and so much more. It is truly amazing to me that these places still function just as they did 75 years ago and more. I considered myself a well educated and well traveled person, but this small volume has opened up a world that I knew about but never fully appreciated before and has made Paris one of my favorite vacation spots. To heck with the Louvre, this is what Paris is all about!

A great gift for Paris lovers
This is the first book to take to France with you (or to give to a friend who is going). The history is brief, but it goes back two centuries.


Long Shadows
Published in Paperback by Vintage Books Canada (2001)
Author: Paris
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Confronting the Wrenching , and Doing It Very Well Indeed
Ms. Paris writes with the immediacy of a novelist and the analytical qualities of a philosopher. She is clearly enormously intelligent, well-read, introspective, synthetic in the best sense, and probing. I would not call her analysis of the experiences of memory and history optimistic; on many levels, it is starkly cynical. I would call it fascinating and deep, not only from the many interviews she did but from the background research that informs them. Her treatments of Germany, Japan, South Africa, the United States, the Balkans, and the issues of UN tribunals and international criminal jurisprudence are balanced, percipient, and compelling. She is a voice for dogged determination in the process of incrementally improving our species and its approach to conflict, against the culture of silence and looking the other way, against atrocity with impunity. Read her. Find motivation in her stories. Then act as best you can to further a better and different world. Humanity is, and always will be, a work in progress. Ms. Paris contributes mightily to an appreciation of the costs, tradeoffs, and nuances that entails.

A Book For Our Times
Erna Paris has done something very important: gone behind the scenes of the usual historical process, and met with people directly affected by the horrid events in Nazi Germany, Hirohito's Japan, apartheid-era South Africa, Vichy France and the disintegrated Yugoslavia. It's a personal history, but it works perfectly, because she asks the right questions and pursues the truth among the legends and fairy tales we have been told about these homicidal, genocidal regimes.

If you're fed up with the usual 'names and dates' types of history, and the 'just so' stories they convey, dig into this book. You're sure to be surprised at every turn. Seriously, you can't go wrong, if you're looking for an insight into how history is rewritten to fool us.

probing analysis of how nations cope with past tragedies
Having just caught the author on C-SPan2, I was motivated to comment on this very important book. Paris, a Canadian, has made a career out of examining, often with great inisght and sensitivity, the impact of tragic historical events on future generations within afflicted generations and she doles out her compassion equally to the children of victims as well as to the children of oppressors who seem to carry a blood-guilt down through the generations. Her specialty has been covering and analyzing the impact of WWII but this book covers that ground and more in the area of Slavery, Apartheid, The Rape of Nanking and more. Her conclusions are much what you'd expect but that's no reason to avoid this book. The strength in her writing is conveying a very personal involvement with her subjects, permitting us as readers to get to "know their pain" (to use an overemployed but apt phrase) and see all the survivors as human in their frailty and in their need to find some way to live with the past. She shows us that there is an entire range of coping mechanisms in dealing with atrocities from total official denial as in Japan to spasms of grief as in Germany. In between are nations just beginning to acknowledge their painful pasts and trying to find their own way of putting those memories to rest while still keeping the message of past lessons. She stresses the need for a system of Justice to bring out the truth or nontruth of events so that groups of people can know and accept the truth. I feel she makes an accurate case that where this no accounting, there is very little healing. I found most fascinating her description of her meeting with a Hiroshima survivor and what that revealed about a specific culture predicting how a nation might choose to react to discussions of the past. This is a fine effort and one worth handing to any Highschool age student who is far too young to have experienced any fallout from the tragedies discussed. In light of all the World War II Revivalism going on and with HBO's upcoming BAND OF BROTHERS dealing with the European theater, this work would make a nice supplemental reading requirement.


Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guide to Paris (Eyewitness Travel Top 10)
Published in Paperback by Dk Pub Merchandise (01 February, 2002)
Authors: Dorling Kindersley Publishing and Mike Gerrard
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Great book for a 4 day trip.
This book was very useful in my 4-day trip to Paris. It helps you locate all the hot spots in each neighboorhood and of course the top 10 places to visit.

What I did is, I chose a few of those top 10 places, then once I was there, I could check the book to find my way to the best restaurants, museums, streets and sights in that area.

The map of the Metro is very helpful.

The book fits in your pocket which is nice if you like to travel light.

Bonne journee!

a great guide
This book was great! It is concise and accurate, and fits in your pocket. It gives you great highlights, plus suggested walks and places to eat. It has no extraneous information, so you don't have to sort through it to find the good stuff, like most guide books.

Perfect travel guide for a quick trip
If you are going to be in a city for 3-4 days, the Top 10 Travel Guides are perfect. It gives you the top 10 sites to see and the top 10 things to see at each site. In addition, it goes into more depth in each area of the city...giving you additional top 10 lists. For a first time visit to a particular city, you can feel overwhelmed with the amount of site seeing involved. These books are perfect in helping you decide what are the most important sites to see. I have personally used the London and Paris versions of the guide books. I can't wait until more books in the series are published.


Fodor's Around Paris With Kids (Fodor's Around Paris With Kids)
Published in Paperback by Fodors Travel Pubns (12 June, 2001)
Authors: Emily Emerson, Andrea Lehman, and Fodor
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Good choice for ideas for kids!
Purchased this book hoping to find kid friendly eats and places to see in Paris. Was a good starting point. My son actually loved a few of the adult things as well. Suggest you try a tour of the area with a one of the red double decker buses for the older kids.

First thing to pack
This is a real gem of a book. We used it extensively in planning a trip to Paris with our 9 year old son, and it was amongst the first things packed. The information is useful, the size is wholly convenient. Nothing glossy, no photos, no pictures at all. I have borrowed all the glossy stuff from the library to read ahead of time, and anything useful have put as margin notes in THIS book, because this is the one I plan to have along. It tells you how to get to each place, opening hours, what to see and do there. Includes information on attractions especially for kids, as well as all the conventional tourist sites, museums etc, emphasising the aspects that are most likely to appeal to kids. It tells you which parks in Paris kids can run and play on grass - that alone has to be worth its weight in gold.

If you are a first-time visitor to Paris you may feel more comfortable having a good, conventional guide book along as well, but if you don't need the basics (such as how to buy a metro ticket etc) AND you have children along with you, I reckon you'll want to have this book above all others.

This is the best
On a recent trip to Paris with my 5 1/2 yr old daughter, I must have referred to this book about a 100 times. Its really geared to what children like, is easy read, well-indexed, and has all the pertinents, like when one can rent sail boats at the Jardin des Tuileries.


Footsteps : adventures of a romantic biographer
Published in Unknown Binding by Hodder and Stoughton ()
Author: Richard Holmes
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An Enthralling Romp Through The Haunted Past
This is the kind of book at which Holmes, in my view, excels. I'm not that particularly fond of his painstaking mammoth biographies of Shelley and Coleridge because, well, they're too run-of-the-mill and not all that much fun to read.-In other words, just the opposite of books like this one. This type of book, where the relationship between Holmes and the author he is writing about is constantly in play add a mystery and a haunted quality inherent in the time elapsed between Holmes' time and the author's that keeps the readers attention constantly transfixed (or, at least, this reader's). As Holmes himself puts it, "The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing, almost as fast as human skin." Examples: The passage on Shelley's view of the double, the "ghost of the living person" the view of which signified the shadow world invading this one; Shelley's view that this is what was happening to him just before he drowned himself is the most affecting passage I've read on Shelley's end, and together with the photograph of the Casa Magni, which I'd never actually seen, and whose setting Mary Shelley said caused them to be in touch with the unreal sent shivers up my spine. It's not to be missed.-The section on Nerval was also interesting, as were the others. Curiously, the same sort of thing seems to have affected Nerval "...Here began for me what I shall call the overflowing of dreams into real life." Both sections are excellent and Holmes' speculation that "Nerval's whole work was a form of suicide note" seems right on the mark. The other sections are intriguing as well, but these two haunted me the most. In a moment of brave self-exposure where Holmes is following Shelley's footsteps in Rome, he recounts a dinner where they toasted Shelley as a fellow-exile and his name "rang to the roof." Holmes writes, "I sat there looking at my plate dangerously close to tears. I...determined to write a book for people like them too, who would never read it, people who have lost most things except hope."-You've succeeded Mr Holmes.

A tremendous glimpse into the world of biographers
Beginning with a journey tracing Stevenson's walking tour in France, Holmes shows himself to be both a remarkable adventurer and writer. The thing that comes out clearly when he discovers the ruins of a bridge crossed by Stevenson is that the past is the past. And while it has an impact on the world today, it is gone. If you only read it for the first essay, it is well worth the money. The other essays explore other themes that affect biographers. A superb book that should be read by anyone interested in the mysrerious relationship between biographer and subject.

Adventure Is Key Word
I read this the spring it came out, the spring I learned that once again there would be no summer vacation, no breaking free of the time zone. As much as a book can stand in for actual experience, this did, and I got a rollicking review of Romantic figures in the bargain. Holmes obviously conducts meticulous research, but he writes it up in a style that has the sweep of a fine novel. He is a master at marrying study and action.


The Impressionists' Paris: Walking Tours of the Painters' Studios, Homes, and the Sites They Painted
Published in Hardcover by Little Bookroom (1997)
Author: Ellen Williams
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Excellent mixture of information and imagery
This and a Metro map will take care of me for a week. A little about Paris, a little about the period, a little about the artists... "The Impressionists' Paris" is a learning experience, even for a student of impressionist art, and even if you're not planning a trip to Paris soon.

All but one of these 3 walks are on the right bank, which is otherwise somewhat impressionist-deprived since the good paintings moved from l'Orangerie to Musee d'Orsay. Combine Walk 1 with a visit to Orsay one day, then combine Walk 2 with an excursion to Giverny on another day.

Work the cafes into the rest of your visit to Paris. If you're into art and food, this book is a great companion to "The Historic Restaurants of Paris" by the same author.

Don't expect to find all of the locations intact, and there's the ever-present reality of construction and scaffolding. I hardly recognized the Pont de l'Europe from Caillebotte's painting, and Cafe de la Paix is closed for renovation (9/2002).

I'd love to meet this author sometime. She did this book like I would have (if I knew nearly as much as she). Each tour has a good map, and about 14-18 pages (each) of descriptions and pictures. Walking directions are in bold.

The book has nice color plates of selected paintings, matched loosely with period photos of Paris taken from old postcards, some with their 'timbres' quaintly intact. Lengthy captions add colorful trivia. She even finishes off the book with a tastefully written list of Paris cemeteries where the impressionists are buried.

Bon Voyage!

A work of art
There are many books about Paris, many about the Impressionists, and several about Paris and the Impressionists. If you're obsessed with Paris and Impressionism, buy them all. However, if you're not willing to build a new wing for your library, or simply want a book you can actually take with you and use while you're in Paris, this is the one. It's a true gem.

c'est incroyable!
If you love Paris and the Impressionists' work this is a must have. Taking the walking tours was the highlight of my last trip to the city of lights. Williams helps you see through 100 years of change into a different Paris.


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