Seductive Journey

September 28, 1998
Levenstein's whimsical chapter titles convey the primitive nature of early transatlantic travel: "Getting There Was Not Half the Fun" and "Eat, Drink, but Be Wary." For adventurous Americans, though, "Paris offered tourists a cultural feast that was simply unavailable in the United States"--and for libidinous Americans, there were the famed maisons de tolerance. In the 1850s and '60s Baron Haussmann put modern buildings in the center of Paris while restoring old churches and other monuments and opening small plazas in front of them to make their prospect more pleasing to the eye; the result was a modernized city that still retained its Old World charm and thus drew even more visitors. By now, the didactic tourism of Jefferson's day was turning into leisure tourism, with visitors giving the Louvre a quick once-over and then going shopping. Some of the best writing in this engaging book deals with the effect France had on WWI doughboys who, after meeting chic mademoiselles, were no longer satisfied, as one diarist wrote, with "Mamie and Gerty back at home with their passion for gum and ice cream sodas." And having made their way freely through French society, African American troops wanted better treatment in the U.S. Indeed, these final chapters reveal how the title of this excellent study is just slightly misleading: especially in the 20th century, the subject is not merely tourism but the ways in which two countries mutually shape each other.

July 1, 1998
This highly readable volume from Levenstein (professor emeritus, McMaster Univ.; The Transformation of the American Diet, 1880-1930, LJ 2/1/88), an authority on the social history of food, opens with Jefferson and the beginnings of tourism. Travel in the 18th century was an arduous, masculine event. As ships and the French railroad improved, tourism changed from a high-class learning experience that took months or even years to a matter of shorter, "inauthentic experiences." "Recreational tourism" expanded as fares became cheaper and travel by steerage became a third-class event. By the mid-19th century, women were the main tourists and France the destination of choice, as England was a place for visiting relatives and very few women traveled to eastern Europe. During Prohibition, Paris's legal drinking (as well as its art) beckoned many Americans. This charming narrative account of the often unrequited love of Americans for France is recommended for public and academic libraries.--Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola

August 1, 1998
The first thing that comes to mind after reading this book's title is tourists snapping photos of Revolution-era beheadings and reading brochures describing opium dens where the very rich of Europe commit various acts of debauchery. No photos of the Revolution exist, of course, but there is a lot of interesting reading here, especially since the tourists include writers Theodore Dreiser and Mark Twain, each of whom eloquently elegizes his host country; or Oliver Wendell Holmes; or Pablo Picasso (Picasso a tourist in France? Yes!). Levenstein's book is aptly named, for he lures us with the experiences of others through history. En route to developing taste and refinement in Paris, such figures as Thomas Jefferson experienced the magnificent food and other, uh, pleasures of the flesh. As the advent of the transatlantic steamship loomed, more and more women headed to France to climb socially. Most significantly, though, the author traces the effect Americans in Paris had on tourism in Europe throughout the ages--and does it in a fun, almost rollicking fashion. ((Reviewed August 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)