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been my second homes,” and “When the age for dress-up was over, I immersed myself in novels, diving into other peoples’ imaginary worlds. The streets of Dickens’s London were much easier for me to get my head around than fractions.” But when she admits to despising mayonnaise, I knew I’d practically met my twin (for the record, we’re talking supermarket mayonnaise, not the homemade variety). Gwendal, the love in Bard’s life, is a dream of a boyfriend/husband. Without giving too much away, I’ll just note that when he spruces up the apartment while Bard is away in New York, he immediately secured the top spot on my list of World’s Best Husbands (knocking to second place Richard Dreyfus’s character in The Goodbye Girl when he sets a dinner table for two on a New York rooftop). It is Bard herself, however, for whom we’re cheering. She is inspiring, warm, funny, wise, and lucky, this last for figuring out sooner than most what truly matters in life. And her passage about the “promised land” in the conclusion is the best I’ve ever read about embracing the values that France offers while retaining the best ones from the U.S.A.

My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme (Knopf, 2006). In her introduction to this wonderful memoir, published not long after her death in 2004, Child describes the book as being “about some of the things I have loved most in life: my husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating.” It was a new experience for her, writing a series of linked autobiographical stories instead of a collection of recipes, and it focuses mostly on the years she lived in Paris and Marseille, 1948 through 1954. “Those early years in France were among the best in my life,” she writes, and you can feel her excitement about being in Paris on the page. By now everyone knows that the movie Julie & Julia was based on this book and Julie Powell’s book Julie & Julia (Little, Brown, 2005), which I enjoyed mostly because I loved that Powell was so inspired by Child to start her blog and work her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Paris in the Fifties, Stanley Karnow (Times Books, 1997). Before he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines and before the bestselling Vietnam, Karnow went to Paris in 1947 intending to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, landing a job as a foreign correspondent for Time, and happily for the rest of us he saved carbon copies of all his original dispatches, a revised selection of which form the basis of this engaging look into a noteworthy decade.

Paris Personal, Naomi Barry (Dutton, 1963). “Fortunately,” Barry writes in her introduction, “the story of I Love You has no end. It can stand being retold over and over and over again. Otherwise, I ask you, how could anyone dare to write still another book about Paris? So, with love as the excuse, I dared.” And thank God she did, even if it’s now more than forty years old. What is amazing is that a number of restaurants Barry recommends are still with us—La Tour d’Argent, Prunier, La Closerie des Lilas, Maxim’s, Le Grand Vefour—as well as some shops, antiques galleries, museums, etc. In his endorsement, Art Buchwald writes, “Naomi Barry knows Paris better than any American woman I know.” Having had the supreme pleasure of meeting Barry on several occasions, I completely concur. I treasure this volume.

Paris: Places and Pleasures, Kate Simon (Capricorn Books, 1971). There are few travel writers like Simon around anymore, so if you run across a copy of this out-of-print volume, buy it without hesitation. “An Uncommon Guidebook” is how it’s described on the cover, and indeed this is much more like a memoir than a guidebook. Though there are recommendations for things to see and do, they aren’t approached in a predictable fashion, and it’s the essays—“How Come the Angry Parisian?,” “Est-ce Que Vous Parlez Anglais?,” and “Parisian Contours and Stances”—that really make the book worthwhile and still apropos. Simon wisely notes that, with few exceptions,