Currently reading
A London Family, 1870-1900: A Trilogy
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
All the Names
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Down the Garden Path
Virtue Betray'd, Or, Anna Bullen
Year of Wonders
Swallows and Amazons
Illusion in java
Paris - Germany: Europäische Reportagen 1931-1950
Janet Flanner was an American correspondent in Paris for the New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1975. She was an expatriate partly because she had little respect or love for her home country, describing it as "our plain and tasteless republic." She is full of snark about Americans, in fact. In describing the American author Edith Wharton, she says, "Fortunately...she was repeatedly sent as a child to the Continent, where governesses taught her French, German, and Italian. Something very close to English she had already learned in her correct American home." In another chapter, she describes American tastes in music thus: "a land bred on 'Turkey in the Straw.'"She loved Paris though and it really shows in the stories and mini biographies in this book, all written before 1940, and published in a variety of places including Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Harper's Bazaar. I enjoyed most of them. I also found her very dated bio of Hitler, written in 1935 before we knew much about him, interesting from a historical perspective.
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