Joan DeJean on 'How Paris Became Paris'

'How Paris Became Paris'
'How Paris Became Paris' by Joan DeJean
Book cover courtesy of publisher

Kerri just returned from her trip to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Paris with a group of MPR travelers.

During her travels, Kerri read Joan DeJean's "How Paris Became Paris."

"I used it as a kind of historical guidebook to the city: why Paris shimmers with so much light; how its beautiful boulevards came to be," she said.

DeJean joins The Daily Circuit to discuss where the mythology and reality of Paris meet.

"In the Paris represented by playwrights and novelists, by historians of the city and the authors of guidebooks, by painters and cartographers and engravers, both the city and its inhabitants had a special glow: it and they were more elegant and more seductive than anywhere or anyone else," she writes. "A mythic idea destined to survive for centuries thus took root."