Must Read Book -Paris Paris: Journey Into The City Of Light

David S. Downie (born 1958 in San Francisco) is a multilingual Paris-based American author and journalist who writes most often about culture, food and travel.

Downie’s book is Paris, Paris (2005), which explores the sites of Paris, from the Ile Saint-Louis to Les Halles and the parks of Montsourisand Buttes Chaumont. Paris, Paris also features insights on Georges Pompidou, François Mitterrand and Coco Chanel.

From the inside cover:

"What would you do if you were passionate about Paris," asks author David Downie, "had lived there for nearly twenty years, married a Paris-born Franco-American, become a French dual national, written dozens of feature articles about aspects of Paris life – things that you felt somehow captured the essence of Paris, were the elements, so to speak, of what makes Paris, Paris and nowhere else?" You might decide to write Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light, a portrait in thirty perennial essays, with thirty striking photographs by Alison Harris, of the world’s favorite city. The essays are grouped into three sections: Paris Places, Paris People, Paris Phenomena. "To take this book as a guidebook," writes best-selling novelist and longtime Paris resident Diane Johnson in her foreword, "walk out with it as [Downie] did and follow his path, is to have adventures, and to see a side of Paris anyone could see, but hardly anyone does." Downie is the Parisian friend you always dreamed of having. Hand-in-hand with his readers he discovers the enchantments of the Luxembourg Gardens ("… a perfect world – sixty acres of terraced woods and walks, fountains and pools, with sweeping perspectives along alleys of surgically clipped trees") and Place des Vosges ("Time and the elements have conspired with the foibles and fantasies of man to round the square’s hard edges and skew what had been intended as perfect symmetry"). He tracks Amedeo Modigliani across Montmartre noting that, "A puritanical biographer of our current age might describe Modigliani as macho, womanizing, obsessive and demonic, a substance-abusing madman too handsome and talented for his own good, at once self-destructive and murderous, a kind of proto-Jim Morrison of The Doors, a rebel without a cause, the last of the great Bohemian Romantics of the Belle Époque." Downie sees Coco Chanel as "an ambivalent figure if ever there was one, and somehow, for me, the incarnation of a peculiar breed of Parisian..." To prove his point he takes you into Coco’s private apartment in the Rue Cambon then onwards to the obscenely luxurious Coco Chanel Suite at the Ritz. Elsewhere the skeptical, wry, irreverent author of Paris, Paris encounters the Michelin Man amid gourmets savoring $300-a-plate delicacies at the "Grand Restaurants with Grande Cuisine whipped up by the Grand Chefs of the capital", then shares a sand pit with Paris’ dog-obsessed in Vie de Chien ("The pit-bullish mutt with the spiked collar and shocking name of Satan had tangled pedigreed Samba and Scirocco’s precious Hermès leashes…"). Paris, Paris may do service as a guidebook, but it reaches far beyond the realm of the pocket-Cicerone. "The essays are delightful as essays," notes Johnson. "Suppose you aren’t in Paris? Or you’re in Paris on a rainy day? Just to sit inside and read this book will transport you, for Downie is above all a wonderful, and wonderfully well-read writer."