Here are 100 books that French Spirits fans have personally recommended if you like
French Spirits.
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I became fascinated with France and the French as a child, and over the past 40 years I have spent as much time as I can here. I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my dual passions—for France and for literature—in creating a series of classes for CUNY study abroad programs and for the Politics & Prose bookstore. Through this work, over the past 20+ years I have spent much of my time reading and teaching works of literature that explore France and the French people in depth. I now live in France, and I continue to find the French endlessly fascinating. I think I always will.
This book is a wonderful romp through the adventures and misadventures of a hapless American who speaks very little French (he describes himself as “functionally illiterate”) yet manages to charm his way into a very happy part-time life in a little village in Brittany. Greenside’s self-deprecating sense of humor as he recounts the many awkward situations he finds himself in as he settles into life in France and deals with a variety of everyday challenges is often laugh-out-loud funny. I also recommend the sequel to this book,(not quite) Mastering the Art of French Living, but you should definitely start with this one: the author’s unanticipated, unpredictable, joyful journey into a life in France, told from the very beginning, is too good to miss.
In a story that stands above the throngs of travel memoirs, full of gorgeous descriptions of Brittany and at times hysterical encounters with the locals, Mark Greenside describes his initially reluctant travels in this "heartwarming story" (San Francisco Chronicle) where he discovers a second life.
When Mark Greenside-a native New Yorker living in California, political lefty, writer, and lifelong skeptic-is dragged by his girlfriend to a tiny Celtic village in Brittany at the westernmost edge of France in Finistere, or what he describes as "the end of the world," his life begins to change.
I became fascinated with France and the French as a child, and over the past 40 years I have spent as much time as I can here. I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my dual passions—for France and for literature—in creating a series of classes for CUNY study abroad programs and for the Politics & Prose bookstore. Through this work, over the past 20+ years I have spent much of my time reading and teaching works of literature that explore France and the French people in depth. I now live in France, and I continue to find the French endlessly fascinating. I think I always will.
People often ask me what is the best book to take with them to Paris if they can only take one, and this is the book I always recommend. This collection of essays, which can easily fit into a purse or a backpack, is brimming over with fascinating stories about “the people, places, and phenomena” of Paris. Downie’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, and the idiosyncratic curiosity that draws him (and his readers along with him) into a variety of offbeat situations make for fun as well as highly informative reading. It’s a great book to take with you to read in Paris, or sitting at home dreaming of or remembering Paris—and the selection of topics is varied enough that I believe there’s something in it to interest almost anyone.
“Beautifully written and refreshingly original . . . makes us see [Paris] in a different light.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
Swapping his native San Francisco for the City of Light, travel writer David Downie arrived in Paris in 1986 on a one-way ticket, his head full of romantic notions. Curiosity and the legs of a cross-country runner propelled him daily from an unheated, seventh-floor walk-up garret near the Champs-Elysées to the old Montmartre haunts of the doomed painter Modigliani, the tombs of Père-Lachaise cemetery, the luxuriant alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens and the aristocratic Île Saint-Louis midstream in the Seine.…
I became fascinated with France and the French as a child, and over the past 40 years I have spent as much time as I can here. I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my dual passions—for France and for literature—in creating a series of classes for CUNY study abroad programs and for the Politics & Prose bookstore. Through this work, over the past 20+ years I have spent much of my time reading and teaching works of literature that explore France and the French people in depth. I now live in France, and I continue to find the French endlessly fascinating. I think I always will.
Harriet Welty Rochefort was born and raised in small-town Iowa but she made her way to Paris right after graduating from college. Married to a Frenchman for more than 50 years, she is deeply integrated into French family life. This book offers, therefore, the dual perspective of an outsider who is now also an insider. Her interviews with experts ranging from patissiers and sommeliersto coiffeurs and sellers of lingerie and perfume provide a rich in-depth exploration of the details of daily French life. I love the sidebar conversations she has with her husband, who provides his invaluable perspective on how the French think; the many handy bits of practical advice she has gathered from her mother-in-law over the years; and her unabashed and enduring appreciation of her American roots.
The French truly are singular in the way they live, act, and think - from the lightness of their pastries to the decadence of their Hermes scarves. They simply exude a certain je ne sais quoi that is a veritable art form. In "Joie de Vivre", Harriet Welty Rochefort, an American who married a Frenchman and has lived in Paris for more than thirty years, explores the secrets of the French - from romance and style to acting and flirting like a Parisienne to wining and dining a la francaise. With tips and tricks like how to diet like a…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I became fascinated with France and the French as a child, and over the past 40 years I have spent as much time as I can here. I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine my dual passions—for France and for literature—in creating a series of classes for CUNY study abroad programs and for the Politics & Prose bookstore. Through this work, over the past 20+ years I have spent much of my time reading and teaching works of literature that explore France and the French people in depth. I now live in France, and I continue to find the French endlessly fascinating. I think I always will.
This is one of the best books I know for covering a huge amount of material in a compact, reader-friendly, yet very thorough form. The author provides insightful perspective on French history, psychology, culture, cuisine, language, and habits, and offers particularly helpful advice about how to recover from the inevitable moments of cultural awkwardness. Although some of the practical information is outdated, the general insights into and analysis of French people and their culture will never go out of date. I think it’s well worth reading for anyone who has an interest in France and the French that goes beyond the surface; anyone who has a genuine interest in understanding this fascinating people and culture.
CultureShock! France peels away the layers of the French and their country to reveal the heart of the Gallic temperament. The book navigates through essential topics such as learning the French language, how best to work with the French, observing their body language and even how to choose wine in a restaurant. Glean practical advice on finding a home, getting the utilities running and putting the children into school. Find out more about the French, a complex people who maintain a cool composure on the outside yet are inwardly passionate about art, romance, cuisine and wine. Discover how easily the…
I’ve been passionate about wine since I was a teenager in New Zealand and I now teach and write about it, judge in wine competitions, and travel the world to visit wine regions. I teach European history and the history of food and drink at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. As a wine historian, I spend weeks each year in archives, studying everything from changes in vineyard area and the weather in specific years to the taxation of wine and patterns of wine drinking. Currently, I’m working in several French archives for a book on wine in the French Revolution. It will be my ninth wine book.
Terroir is the notion that the environment that grapevines grow in is imprinted on the wine they produce. It was universally accepted for several decades but is now hotly debated, as scientists have debunked the idea that certain soils and rocks transfer flavour and texture to wine. In the 1920s Burgundy became the first region to embrace the idea of terroir and in her book, Marion Demossier examines the circumstances that gave rise to it and the way that terroir was adopted and adapted by wine regions throughout the world so that wine producers could claim that their wines expressed ‘a sense of place’. This excellent book cuts through much of the marketing nonsense about wine.
"Demossier's engrossing analysis of Burgundy-the wine, the place, the brand-should be imbibed (pun intended!) on many levels-and slowly, for best appreciation."-foodanthro.com
Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social, and cultural world of Burgundy wines, the role of terroir (the environmental factors that affect a crop's character), and its transnational deployment in China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.
It demystifies the terroir ideology by providing a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept. While the Burgundian model of terroir has gone global by acquiring UNESCO world heritage status, its very…
I knew nothing about wine and drank it only rarely until I went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s. Even then, I couldn’t afford more than basic plonk. It was not until I started doing research in Dijon every summer in the 1980s, making great friends in the process, eating and drinking at their dining tables, and visiting their favorite vignerons with them for dégustations, that I began to appreciate wine, not just as a fantastic beverage, but as a social and cultural creator. And as a historian, Iappreciatethat drinking wine thatcomesfrom vineyards planted in the Middle Ages connects us withour ancestors inthe past.
If terroir is about place, Loftus shows us one particular place in rural Burgundy, and especially the people living there who grow the grapes and make the wine. These vignerons help us understand that good wine is made in the vineyard, not through any manipulation after the harvest in a fermentation tank or oak barrel. Loftus also shows how wine influences local politics, as in 1879 when the village elders petitioned the French government to add the name of their most famous vineyard—Montrachet—to the name of their town, Puligny, thus allowing their Grand Cru vineyard name to appear on the label of humbler bottles bearing just the village name, following in the footsteps of Nuits-St. Georges, Chambolle-Musigny, Aloxe-Corton, and dozens of other Burgundian villages.
The sleepy village of Puligny-Montrachet produces the greatest white wines in Burgundy, famous throughout the world, but the place itself is unknown to outsiders. The lives of its inhabitants are shaped by the rhythms of the agricultural year, punctuated by the intense activity of the harvest, when the noise of tractors echoes down the narrow streets as the grapes are carried to the cellars.
This vivid and evocative journal of everyday life in rural France takes us through the cycle of the seasons, from the bonfires of the winter prunings to the celebrations of the feast of St Vincent. We…
At the age of forty-nine, Laurie Woodford rents out her house, packs her belongings into two suitcases, and leaves her life in upstate New York to relocate to Seoul, South Korea. What begins as an opportunity to teach college English in Asia evolves into a nomadic adventure.
Anne-Marie Walters was born in 1923 in Geneva to a British father and French mother. At the outbreak of war in 1940, the family escaped to Britain, where Anne-Marie volunteered for the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). Having been approached by SOE in 1943, she was accepted for training and in January the following year dropped into France by parachute to work as a courier with George Starr, head of the Wheelwright circuit of the SOE in SW France. This she did until August 1944, when Starr sent her back to Britain under somewhat controversialcircumstances. Anne-Marrie was awarded the OBE in 1945 in recognition of her “personal courage and willingness to undergo danger.”
Keith Janes’ book is 480 pages of solid fact! He sheds light on one of the less well-known -- but most successful -- of the escape and evasion lines running through France to Spain. More than 300 Allied service personnel (including over 150 American aircrew) were seen safely south to freedom, and Janes records them all, alongside details of the hundreds of people who helped them and what happened to them. Meticulously researched, following his discovery of an account of his own father’s escape from France after Dunkerque, the book provides an invaluable historical record containing much hitherto unpublished material.
The first book to recount the stories of every single Allied serviceman (including more than a hundred and fifty American aircrew) helped by one of the major escape lines of World War Two, complete with details of their helpers. Escape lines - which should more properly be called evasion lines - can be described as organisations that helped stranded servicemen make their way from enemy occupied territories back to friendly territory. Of the three major escape lines running through France during the Second World War - the Pat O'Leary line, which covered most of the country, the Comete line, which…
I have been researching and writing about cocktails for over two decades. My first book, The New Cocktail Hour, appeared in 2016 and I have since written seven more books pairing mixed drinks with topics such as classic movies, vinyl music, the DC Comics universe, Westerns, and travel. Cocktails are truly global concoctions, invented by using tea from the Far East, sugar from the Caribbean, liquor from Europe, and citrus from the tropics. The best books about mixed drinks transport us to a worldly state of mind wherever we are.
Australian bartender Chad Parkhill tells the origin stories of eighty iconic cocktails, mixing history and geography in this clever book that is at once a resource and drinks manual. Want to know how the G&T traveled from India to England? Or the history of the Kir Royale? This book shares it all so readers are sure to be the smartest guests at the next cocktail party. Vibrant, lush illustrations make the book extra-captivating.
Ever since its invention in the late 18th century, the cocktail has been a global traveller. Born in England and raised in America, a cocktail can take influences from all over the world and mix them up into exciting new combinations. This book celebrates this globe-trotting history through 80 cocktails - each with its own story to tell.
Bartender and writer Chad Parkhill takes you on a whirlwind global tour, with recipes designed to be made at home. You'll learn about the surprising military history behind the bubbly Venetian Spritz; how the G&T moved from India to England (and why…
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
This is French peasant life in its last days, a life rendered from the outside by one who became an insider.
Berger went to live and work among the peasants of the French south in 1962. This world, like that of Spain at much the same time, saw the death of the old peasantry. It is not a work of observation like Norman Lewis’s book but a series of fictional stories. It treats peasants as human beings, on an equal standing with all others in society. They have depth and gravity. Just like us all.
How awful most writing about peasants is. This stands out proudly from that awfulness.
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of skeptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters f rest; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, but an inexorable part of the lives of men who…
Marianne Bohr and her husband, about to turn sixty, are restless for adventure. They decide on an extended, desolate trek across the French island of Corsica — the GR20, Europe’s toughest long-distance footpath — to challenge what it means to grow old. Part travelogue, part buddy story, part memoir, The…
I read this book many years ago in 2000. This book with magic realism awoke my love of magic (buried since a child). Five bottles of homemade wine hold powerful but subtle magic which transform the hero’s life. I love the concept that there is always hope; that there is something out there if we just reach out and believe. The setting is in France which also awoke a desire to travel–and I love making homemade wine!
This captivating and charming novel from international multi-million copy seller Joanne Harris takes us back to the French village we first discovered in Chocolat. Seamlessly interweaving the past and the present, magic and memory, it is a sensual rollercoaster that will appeal to fans of Victoria Hislop, Fiona Valpy, Maggie O'Farrell and Rachel Joyce.
'Thickly sensuous, wildly indulgent, magical escapism: Chocolat lovers will drink deeply' --GUARDIAN 'Joanne Harris has the gift of conveying her delight in the sensuous pleasures of food, wine, scent and plants... Blackberry Wine has all the appeal of a velvety scented glass of vintage wine' --…
