Description: In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. It was in part a professional decision -- Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades -- but it was also a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, Paris was not all strolls down the Champs-Elysees: There was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with everyday family life. Evenings with French intellectuals precede middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons are filled with trips to the Musee d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers are eaten while three-star chefs debate a "culinary crisis". With singular wit and insight, Gopnik manages to weave the magical with the mundane in a book Entertainment Weekly called "magisterial".

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