The Greater Journey by David McCoullough

This book is subtitled 'Americans in Paris'. It is unlike other books that I have read by this author--he tends to write biographies, or books about a particular evern (the Jonestown flood, 1776, the building of the Panama Canal)--this book is about a city and the Americans who inhabited it and what they took from it. The book spans the nineteenth century, and goes into the early 20th century, which is when most of think of expatriots living in Paris after The Great War and through Prohibition--but that is not the focus of this book--he covers it, but with the same even hand that he begins the book in the 1830's, when Samuel Morse and James Fennimore Cooper (close friends, it turns out) were in Paris, not as diplomats but to broaden their experiences--to be in a city of art and imagination and to learn from that. The book is not as sleekly put together as is usual for the author, but the story is strongest when it is rooted in the experiences of particular people rather than in the description of the atmosphere of place, and is overall a good read.