Booklist Review
Two heartfelt tributes to Paris' singular allure and fecund artistic climate.Green, an American born (1900) and bred in Paris, has achieved tremendous literary success there but was unknown here until the announced release of The Distant Lands [BKL Je 1 91], a novel about the American South. Now another of his new works is available in this country, a bilingual edition of meditations on his beloved city. Green approaches Paris in a prose equivalent of a "long, aimless stroll," claiming that the only way to really know a city is "to waste time in it." Green doesn't waste a word in his piercing descriptions of Paris in light and rain, seen from high spots or explored slowly on foot. He practices the divination of sustained observation, perceiving and expressing the moods of the Seine, the echoes of past emotions in secret places, and the poise, charm, and, sometimes, ugliness of Parisian architecture. Green's photographs of Paris over the past 70 years (some of which are traveling in a current exhibition) make this a trilingual celebration of one artist's lifelong involvement with his muse.Wiser is another American in love with Paris. His Crazy Years, Paris in the Twenties [BKL N 1 83] documented that fervently creative and competitively social decade. His latest study focuses on the private lives of five diverse and influential expatriate women: Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, Caresse Crosby, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Josephine Baker. His vibrant, frank profiles are composed of imagined scenes based on letters, memoirs, and gossip with an evolving Paris in the background. Wiser dramatizes each woman's Parisian experiences, which range from release and inspiration for the disciplined Cassatt and Wharton to adventures with drugs and sex for Crosby, a miasma of unsettledness and discouragement for Fitzgerald, and dazzling success for Baker. These succinct and revealing portraits create an illuminating and unique cross section of American women expatriates during Paris' heyday. ~--Donna Seaman
Choice Review
"The great good place" is Paris and the people are five expatriate American women who lived there in the first half of the 20th century. William Wiser knows the milieu and the biographical scholarship, and he has a novelist's feel for the stories of Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, Zelda Fitzgerald, Caresse Crosby, and Josephine Baker. He has in fact written about them as a novelist would, enhancing the bare bones of their events by imagining the scenes that must have occurred in their lives, which entwined and paralleled each other. The result is an informative and highly readable collection of stories that nonspecialist readers will find literate and interesting. At the same time, Wiser is not an original researcher, and the novelized stories will reduce the value of the book to the scholar, though it would make good introductory reading for the novice. Feminists also will find the subject matter of interest although there is little focus on feminism. General readers will find it delightful, but it is not designed for the unsophisticated reader. The choice of figures to include is excellent, the Mary Cassatt section fresh and interesting, the Caresse Crosby and Josephine Baker sections especially well written. Recommended for general readers.-Q. Grigg, Hamline University
