The Little Bookroom Guide To Paris With Children

How to see Paris's most important sights and neighborhoods in a child-centered way.

We swim in turquoise water and build castles on the beach. We climb up rocks or watch from docks, To see the gray whales breach.

For centuries Paris was the destination of writers from the provinces and from across the ocean, and the city swiftly became an integral part of the lives and work of those who went there. Literary Paris profiles thirty writers and the apartments, cafes, bistros, theaters, museums, and other places central to their daily lives and featured in their work. Literary Paris opens with Moliere, whose farces lampooning man's vanity and hypocrisy delighted the royal courts. In the next century, we glimpse the destitute Zola, so hungry that he ate sparrows caught on his windowsill, and the perpetually bankrupt Balzac who, hoping to evade creditors, required friends to give a secret phrase-"Apple season has arrived" or "I come with lace from Belgium"-to gain admittance into his quarters. Among the twentieth-century writers profiled are Georges Simenon, creator of wildly popular detective novels, who in Paris began an affair with the sensational Josephine Baker; F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, instead of finding the "new rhythm" he sought, burned through his money and talent in the City of Light; as well as Henry Miller, George Orwell, James Baldwin. Women writers include the scandalous Colette; George Sand, friend of Lizst and lover of Chopin; and the sophisticated New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner. Great city landmarks are here, including Notre Dame Cathedral, where Quasimodo imprisoned Esmerelda in Victor Hugo's masterpiece, and the Louvre, where in 1911 the Mona Lisa vanished in a scandal that ruined the poet Guillame Apollinaire. Also featured are the beloved cafes integral to the city's culture, such as Café Flore, where Simone de Beauvoir claimed a spot by the stove each morning to write while her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, was off at war.

The founder of Paris's premier shopping service, Chic Shopping Paris, reveals her prized list of more than 80 boutiques whose offerings embody quintessential Parisian style. Travelers can bring back a piece of Paris in their bag.

Angels are sculpted everywhere in Paris, not just on churches but in unexpected places: holding a lightning rod atop the Théâtre du Châtelet’s roof, adorning a seventeenth-century gilded sundial inside a courtyard at the Sorbonne, hovering above a railroad headquarters where a beautiful stone frieze features young angels flying in to work on the tracks. Subtly, subliminally, the angels are a part of the fanciful and romantic spirit of Paris. Angels of Paris is the first book to explore this intriguing and extraordinary subject. Angels of Paris features beautiful photographs taken from dawn to dusk, in all seasons, accompanied by text explaining the story behind the creation of each angel and of the location in which it is found. Organized chronologically, the book delves into the artistic trends and historic movements the angels reflect and the stories of the artists who created them and of those who commissioned them. Readers will learn about Paris’s history, buildings, and monuments through the abundant, beautiful, and surprising depictions of angels from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Rosemary Flannery has found angels in friezes, plaques, and free-standing sculpture; on fountains and façades, clocks and sundials, monuments and mansions, rooftops and window frames. Angels of Paris is a unique way for lovers of Paris to learn more about the city in a new and unusual way.

Holes meets Hatchet in this unforgettable adventure. The acclaimed author of The Honest Truth and Some Kind of Courage brings his signature blend of action, heart, and beautiful writing to a tale of misfits struggling to survive.Jonathan Grisby is the newest addition to the Slabhenge Reformatory School for Troubled Boys. Shipped out to the remote island facility, Jonathan quickly learns that the school is less concerned with true reform and is more a place where parents send away kids who have become too troublesome. It's an isle of misfit boys.But on his first full day at Slabhenge, a freak lightning storm leaves the kids without any adult supervision. Suddenly the inmates are running the asylum -- and unless Jonathan can move beyond his troubled past and assert himself as a leader, every boy on the island is doomed.

One of the untold stories of the Holocaust—the nail-biting drama of Suzanne Spaak, who risked and gave her life to save hundreds of Jewish children from deportation from Nazi Paris to Auschwitz “vividly dramatizes the stakes of acting morally in a time of brutality” (The Wall Street Journal). Suzanne Spaak was born into the Belgian Catholic elite and married into the country’s leading political family. Her brother-in-law was the Foreign Minister and her husband Claude was a playwright and patron of the painter Renée Magritte. In Paris in the late 1930s her friendship with a Polish Jewish refugee led her to her life’s purpose. When France fell and the Nazis occupied Paris, she joined the Resistance. She used her fortune and social status to enlist allies among wealthy Parisians and church groups. Then, under the eyes of the Gestapo, Suzanne and women from the Jewish and Christian resistance groups “kidnapped” hundreds of Jewish children to save them from the gas chambers. Suzanne’s Children is the “dogged…page-turning account” (Kirkus Reviews) of this incredible story of courage in the face of evil. “Anne Nelson is superb at showing the upheavals in Europe since WWI through vivid, illuminating details…and she also masterfully describes the incremental changes in the Jews’ plight under the Occupation” (Booklist). It was during the final year of the Occupation when Suzanne was caught in the Gestapo dragnet that was pursuing a Soviet agent she had aided. She was executed shortly before the liberation of Paris. Suzanne Spaak is honored in Israel as one of the Righteous Among Nations. Nelson’s “heartfelt story is almost a model for how popular history should be written; it will satisfy lovers of history, Jewish history in particular” (Library Journal).

An NYRB Classic Original Jean-Paul Clébert was a boy from a respectable middle-class family who ran away from school, joined the French Resistance, and never looked back. Making his way to Paris at the end of World War II, Clébert took to living on the streets, and in Paris Vagabond, a so-called “aleatory novel” assembled out of sketches he jotted down at the time, he tells what it was like. His “gallery of faces and cityscapes on the road to extinction” is an astonishing depiction of a world apart—a Paris, long since vanished, of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast—and a no less astonishing feat of literary improvisation: Its long looping breathless sentences, streetwise, profane, lyrical, incantatory, are an adventure in their own right. Praised on publication by the great novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars and embraced by the young Situationists as a kind of manual for living off the grid, Paris Vagabond—here published with the starkly striking photographs of Clébert’s friend Patrice Molinard—is a raw and celebratory evocation of the life of a city and the underside of life.