Impossible City

'' Kuper is a shrewd observer in this entertaining mix of memoir and anthropology '' The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer''s tale of a naif getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city. Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city''s notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on his family''s neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, Paris has globalised, gentrified, and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict. Sometimes it''s a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn''t. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes , and the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the ''Grand Paris'' project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of today''s Paris without the cliches.

Vorwort
An unsparing memoir of the city in the twenty-first century, from a long-time Parisien d'adoption

Autorentext

Simon Kuper is a British author and journalist for the Financial Times. Kuper was born in Uganda of South African parents in 1969, and moved to the Netherlands as a child. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for the Observer, The Times and the Guardian, and also writes regularly for Dutch newspapers. He lives in Paris with his family.

Klappentext

An unsparing memoir of the city in the twenty-first century, from a long-time Parisien d'adoption

Zusammenfassung
'Kuper is a shrewd observer in this entertaining mix of memoir and anthropology' The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city. Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on his family's neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, Paris has globalised, gentrified, and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilisational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the 'Grand Paris' project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of today's Paris without the clichés.