Dreaming in French – The Paris Years of Jacqueline Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis - Hardcover

Kaplan, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226424383 ISBN 13: 9780226424385

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Synopsis

Dreaming in French A year in Paris.... Since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. This book tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women. Full description

About this title

Review:

"Alice Kaplan's triple portrait of three iconic mid-century American women, dazzles beyond our evergreen fascination with the wildly disparate lives of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis. Her lens--the 'junior year abroad'--proves to be a brilliantly revealing cultural magnifying glass. With her meticulous scholarship, a novelist's gimlet eye for detail and the sheer grace of her writing, Kaplan has given us an original and now essential model of that enduring American narrative--the American in Paris."--Patricia Hampl "author of I Could Tell You Stories "

"Compelling and well-observed portraits."--Lauren Elkin "Daily Beast "

"Lively. . . . The links Kaplan makes between these cultures and these women deliver fascinating insight to the conditions and changes surging through not only these particular lives, but those of Americans in general."--Michel Basillieres "Toronto Star "

"Superbly perceptive. . . . Kaplan is a master at . . . selecting just the right aspect of everyday experience to illuminate an important point she wants to make. . . . Some books are well-written on a sentence-by-sentence basis; you leaf back through the pages to find you've underscored choice lines. Dreaming in French is the sort of book where you (well, I) draw vertical lines next to entire paragraphs. Kaplan produces some exquisite lines, yes, but she is positively incandescent on the level of thoughts and observations."--Laura Miller "Salon "

"The #1 nonfiction book to look out for this spring."--Christian Science Monitor

"An enduring group profile of three influential yet completely different American women, for each of whom Paris played a short but transformative role, over three tumultuous decades. . . . The much-admired Kaplan focuses sharply on three women of successive generations, providing a keen feminist-cultural picture of Paris's enduring, if varied, impact."

--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A fascinating group portrait of three different women from three different generations whose trajectories nevertheless converge in one surprising yet significant place: Paris. In this lively, original biographie à trois, Alice Kaplan shows how time spent living in the French capital and learning about its culture gave each of these sui generis heroines 'her own ideas of what counted'--and how those ideas in turn became an indelible part of the American political and cultural landscape."

--Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

"An eloquent, brilliant, and often moving portrayal of three remarkable women whose personal and intellectual engagement with France transformed them, and by extension America as well. These intimate narratives of Jaqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis feel not only vital, but also necessary to our understanding of their moral, aesthetic and political development, and just as importantly, to our understanding of each as a remarkable, flawed, and complicated human being."

--Dinaw Mengestu, author of How to Read the Air

"Gossip is one of the key pleasures--but far from the only one--to be found in Alice Kaplan's absorbing new book. . . . It's a book, to some extent, about the desirability of abandoning or attenuating one's Americanness."--Slate

"Dreaming in French is, in essence a collection of three short, stand-alone biographies. But Kaplan is a talented historian, journalist, and storyteller, and so she's crafted a book greater than the sum of its parts. . . . An informative, well-written work of biographical nonfiction."--Boston Globe

About the Author:

Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Interpreter.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0226424383
• ISBN 13: 9780226424385
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272