I’ve enjoyed reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011), somewhat to my own surprise. Not that he’s a bad author in any way, but I have sometimes been disappointed by the “history-lite” tone of some of his writing (1776 is the most flagrant example that comes to mind).
But The Greater Journey does not disappoint in this manner. It delves into the experience of Americans drawn to Paris in the 19th century, including a legion of American medical students and doctors flocking to Paris between 1815 and 1860. Having read John Harley Warner’s masterful Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century...