About The Book
Bestselling author and world-renowned chef David Lebovitz continues to mine the rich subject of his evolving ex-pat life in Paris, using his perplexing experiences in apartment renovation as a launching point for stories about French culture, food, and what it means to revamp your life.
My Thoughts
There are few people I follow. Sure, there are plenty of authors or artists or entertainers that I kind of keep an eye on because they are likely to create things I will enjoy, but there are truly few that I follow - that I check in on regularly to see what they have done. David Lebovitz is one of those people.
His experiences of being an American living in Europe with the near-constant, never-fading culture shock that entails, mirror my own well eough that I feel a sense of comradery with him. I recognize that to many readers, especially those who have never lived outside the USA, this book might fall flat. But to me, struggling with the neighboring bureaucracy in Spain, renovating my own money pit there, and wondering how anyone could have ever thought that any of these ways of building or working or living could ever be acceptable, I found the entirety of this book to be a complete laugh riot. Like I tagged it above, this is a book for Americans remodeling homes in Europe, and probably not for anyone else.
I have rarely been as entertained as this - the commiseration over the exasperation of discovering a completely alien style of living and working, long after you thought you understood the place you had moved to - that keeps me going.
Do not buy this book for the recipes. It is not a cookbook. There are a few recipes scattered throughout of course, but that is both beside, and absolutely not, the point of this book. The point is humorous catharsis after having survived a prolonged encounter with european contractors.