Sign in with Facebook
Everyday eBook's Reviews > Paris: A Love Story
Paris: A Love Story
by
by
One woman, two men, three eras, and one magical city: a memoirist's dream! Onto this dazzling but well-trod stage strides the fearless Kati Marton, whose Paris: A Love Story is an exciting and elegant paean to the city that is ever at the heart of her high-pressure life as a successful public woman married to two very successful public men.
"Why did no one tell me that we have love on loan?" an inconsolable Marton cries, early in her memoir, as she mourns the sudden death of her adored second husband, the brilliant and indefatigable Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton Peace Accords (which ended the war in Bosnia), and Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Marton is famous in her own right, of course -- an international human rights activist, an award-winning foreign correspondent for ABC News, and the author of seven acclaimed books. Still, adrift and devastated, she retreats once again to an apartment in her beloved Latin Quarter, where she resolves to reinvent her life.
Thus begins her immersion in memories both intimate and thrilling: her family's flight from Budapest in 1957 and their perilous journey to America, the sudden shocking discovery that her maternal grandparents were Jewish and had been murdered at Auschwitz, her youthful romance with the Latin Quarter where Marton studied at the Sorbonne, fell in love, witnessed the violent and exhilarating student uprisings of May 1968, discovered Montaigne, French cinema, and Parisian chic. She returns in 1978 as ABC's foreign correspondent and bureau chief, but this time to the Right Bank; she meets and marries the famous and dashing Peter Jennings, the father of her two children, and begins a fifteen-year love story, played out against the backdrop of world events, "a roller-coaster ride of passionate reunions and agonizing separations." Torn between her love for Jennings and her ambition to become a great journalist, Marton finally divorces him. Soon afterward, she meets the irrepressible Holbrooke, her great and lasting love. They marry in Budapest in 1995, just before the savage summer of Srebrenica and Holbrooke's posting to Sarajevo. Later, when Holbrooke is appointed Ambassador to the UN, they travel together throughout Asia and Africa where, as Marton puts it, "Richard talks to the torturers, I talk to the tortured." During this dramatic period, they retreat often to Paris, which comforts and renews them both.
It is in the final chapters, however, after Holbrooke's tragic death, that Marton gives us the heart of this moving memoir, an exquisite portrait of the city where "sorrow and pain are deemed part of life." This time, the city is hers alone, a magical place where she "no longer live(s) in a protected world of waiting cars and drivers, fixers, first-class travel, and smiling customs officials" but where, once again on the Left Bank, she rereads Proust, takes hot mint tea in the shaded garden of the Paris mosque, discovers the revelatory Musee Nissim de Camondo, and buys her first pair of dangerously high-heeled raspberry pumps. And it is in the cafes, those "fine places for people alone not to feel lonely," where she is once again able to write.
Head to www.EverydayeBook.com for more eBook reviews
"Why did no one tell me that we have love on loan?" an inconsolable Marton cries, early in her memoir, as she mourns the sudden death of her adored second husband, the brilliant and indefatigable Richard Holbrooke, architect of the Dayton Peace Accords (which ended the war in Bosnia), and Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Marton is famous in her own right, of course -- an international human rights activist, an award-winning foreign correspondent for ABC News, and the author of seven acclaimed books. Still, adrift and devastated, she retreats once again to an apartment in her beloved Latin Quarter, where she resolves to reinvent her life.
Thus begins her immersion in memories both intimate and thrilling: her family's flight from Budapest in 1957 and their perilous journey to America, the sudden shocking discovery that her maternal grandparents were Jewish and had been murdered at Auschwitz, her youthful romance with the Latin Quarter where Marton studied at the Sorbonne, fell in love, witnessed the violent and exhilarating student uprisings of May 1968, discovered Montaigne, French cinema, and Parisian chic. She returns in 1978 as ABC's foreign correspondent and bureau chief, but this time to the Right Bank; she meets and marries the famous and dashing Peter Jennings, the father of her two children, and begins a fifteen-year love story, played out against the backdrop of world events, "a roller-coaster ride of passionate reunions and agonizing separations." Torn between her love for Jennings and her ambition to become a great journalist, Marton finally divorces him. Soon afterward, she meets the irrepressible Holbrooke, her great and lasting love. They marry in Budapest in 1995, just before the savage summer of Srebrenica and Holbrooke's posting to Sarajevo. Later, when Holbrooke is appointed Ambassador to the UN, they travel together throughout Asia and Africa where, as Marton puts it, "Richard talks to the torturers, I talk to the tortured." During this dramatic period, they retreat often to Paris, which comforts and renews them both.
It is in the final chapters, however, after Holbrooke's tragic death, that Marton gives us the heart of this moving memoir, an exquisite portrait of the city where "sorrow and pain are deemed part of life." This time, the city is hers alone, a magical place where she "no longer live(s) in a protected world of waiting cars and drivers, fixers, first-class travel, and smiling customs officials" but where, once again on the Left Bank, she rereads Proust, takes hot mint tea in the shaded garden of the Paris mosque, discovers the revelatory Musee Nissim de Camondo, and buys her first pair of dangerously high-heeled raspberry pumps. And it is in the cafes, those "fine places for people alone not to feel lonely," where she is once again able to write.
Head to www.EverydayeBook.com for more eBook reviews
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read
Paris.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
December 7, 2012
– Shelved
