The Greater Journey

Starred review from March 28, 2011
One of Americaâs most popular historians and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, McCullough (1776) has hit the historical jackpot. Travelers before the telephone era loved to write letters and journals, and McCullough has turned this avalanche of material into an entertaining chronicle of several dozen 19th-century Americans who went to Paris, an immense, supremely civilized city flowing with ideas, the arts, and elegance, where no one spit tobacco juice or defaced public property. They discovered beautiful clothing, delicious food, the art of dining ("The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," wrote John Sanderson). Paris had not only pleasures but professional attractions as well. Artists such as Samuel F.B. Morse, Whistler, Sargent, and Cassatt came to train. At a time when American medical education was fairly primitive, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and other prospective physicians studied at the Sorbonneâs vast hospitals and lecture hallsâwith tuition free to foreigners. Authors from Cooper to Stowe, Twain, and James sometimes took up residence. McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.

July 25, 2011
This detailed and riveting book from award-winning historian McCullough traces the lives of several high-profile Americansâincluding Oliver Wendell Holms, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twainâwho, in the 19th century, found themselves in Paris. McCullough limns the impact that Parisian sojourns had upon these travelers and contrasts their lives in France with events occurring in the United States. Co-narrator (and actor) Edward Herrmann provides a stronger narration than the author, however. While McCullough, with his deep voice, grabs listeners' attention initially, he lacks the ability to maintain that interest, as his emphasis, tone, and energy wears over time. Herrmann's ability, on the other hand, to emphasize different facts through deliberate speech and tone, while moving more quickly through less complicated material, makes listening enjoyable and easygoing. A Simon & Schuster hardcover.

Starred review from May 1, 2011
Paris in the 1920s is one of those romantic place-and-time moments every writer wishes to have been part of. But popular historian McCullough, much-respected author of Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001), chose not to retell the story of the so-called Lost Generation. Instead, he relates a less-familiar but no-less-engaging tale: that of the many Americans, most of them in the arts, who were soul-drawn to Paris between 1830 and 1900. He reminds us that in the century of great American expansion, not all pioneers went west. McCulloughs research is staggering to perceive, and the interpretation he lends to his material is impressive to behold as he chronicles a long but never thinly analyzed list of expatriates who settled in Paris for varying lengths of time to take advantage of the heady environmentthe city as museto elevate their talents in their particular fields, whether it be painting (Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent), sculpture (Augustus Saint-Gaudens), writing (Henry James and James Fenimore Cooper), or learning medicine (Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America, and Oliver Wendell Holmes). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: McCulloughs track record says it all: expect his latest book to ascend the best-seller lists and be given a place on the year-end best lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2011

An ambitious, wide-ranging study of how being in Paris helped spark generations of American genius.

Not content to focus on a few of the 19th-century American artists, doctors and statesmen who benefited enormously from their Parisian education, award-winning historian McCullough (1776, 2005, etc.) embraces a cluster of aspiring young people such as portraitist George Healy and lawyer Charles Sumner, eager to expand their horizons in the 1830s by enduring the long sea passage, then spirals out to include numerous other visitors over an entire eventful century. In the early period of trans-Atlantic travel, American tourists were truly risking their lives over the weeks of rough sailing, but novelist James Fenimore Cooper, widowed schoolteacher Emma Hart Willard and young medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. all knew their education was not complete without a stint in the medieval capital. For many of these American rubes, exposure to the fine arts, old-world architecture, fashion, fine dining, museums and teaching hospitals proved transformative, and the knowledge they gained would define their professional lives back in America. The year in Paris artist Samuel Morse painted his extraordinary The Gallery of the Louvre would provide the climax of one career and segue into another--as inventor of the electric telegraph. The revolutionary upheaval of 1848, the advent of the Second Empire and the massive redesign wrought by "demolition artist" Georges-Eug�ne Haussmann changed Paris profoundly, some said for the better, while the Americans continued to arrive: sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and painter Mary Cassatt, among many others. For some, like John Singer Sargent, who had been brought up traversing European capitals, their time spent in Paris would reveal what made them quintessentially American.

A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well.

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