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The Most Beautiful Walk in the World:
A Pedestrian In Paris
The Most Beautiful Walk In The World:
A Pedestrian in Paris
By John BAXTER
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pub. Date: 2011
ISBN: ISBN13: 9780061998546
Pages: 320
Genre: nonfiction / travel
Source: won on a book blog
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This book counts for the following Reading Challenges:


MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BOOK
Are you broke and regret not being able to go to Paris for the holidays?
No problem, read The Most Beautiful Walk In The World, it will be almost as if.
John Baxter mixes fun memoir snippets and great information on Paris in this delightful book.
He started almost by chance as a travel guide, and not too happy about it, and then realized how he could make his own tours so much more fun than the usual stuff.
I really enjoyed very much his book, full not only of fun and personal anecdotes, but also rich in plenty of cultural, historical, and literary references.
It really gives you the desire to pack and go, and follow him with his book as a guide, through the fun tours, well organized.
It reminded me that, as he says, the best walk is the one you make up yourself.
As a bonus, there are interesting advice about traveling in Paris at the end of the book!
QUOTATIONS
My own picture- read below what Baxter has to say on that!
A few lost souls are always hovering at the entrance to the Odéon station – staring up at the green serpentine art nouveau curlicues of Hector Guimard’s cast-iron archway. They may read Metropolitain but they see what Dante saw over the gate to hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
p.3
Rule 1: Spend your money where it does you the most good.
Rule 2: Eat as the French eat.
Tips at the end of the book
WHAT IS IT ABOUT
Thrust into the unlikely role of professional “literary walking tour” guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years.
In this enchanting memoir, acclaimed author and long- time Paris resident John Baxter remembers his yearlong experience of giving “literary walking tours” through the city. Baxter sets off with unsuspecting tourists in tow on the trail of Paris’s legendary artists and writers of the past. Along the way, he tells the history of Paris through a brilliant cast of characters: the favorite cafés of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce; Pablo Picasso’s underground Montmartre haunts; the bustling boulevards of the late-nineteenth-century flâneurs; the secluded “Little Luxembourg” gardens beloved by Gertrude Stein; the alleys where revolutionaries plotted; and finally Baxter’s own favorite walk near his home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. [Goodreads]
READ AN EXCERPT
WATCH A GREAT REVIEW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Baxter (born 1939 in Randwick, New South Wales) is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker.
Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise.
He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction.
Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing.
In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter.
For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese.
Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris. [Goodreads]
Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.
Photo from his cool website that I encourage you to visit.
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HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK?
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE BOOK ON PARIS?
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS IN A COMMENT PLEASE
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this sounds like a book that would make a superb present for someone who has been to Paris already and ‘done’ the usual attractions,
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absolutely!
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I’ve read two John Baxter books so far, and have another waiting to be read. I enjoyed this one too, but didn’t love it as much as the first book of his that I read, A Paris Christmas. Still he has amazing insights for any visitor to Paris- first time visitors, or those lucky enough to have visited multiple times.
http://astrongbeliefinwicker.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/the-most-beautiful-walk-in-world.html
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thanks for your recommendation, definitely something I will look into, I also need to read le flâneur!
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