"A year in Paris"...Countless American students
have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by
their sojourn in the City of Light. "Dreaming in French"
tells three stories of that experience and how it
changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures
in American cultural, intellectual, and political life,
yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn't have
been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a
twenty-year-old debutante from a wealthy East Coast
family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious
Jewish intellectual from a family of modest means.
Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a
prominent African American family in Birmingham,
Alabama, found herself the only black student in her
year abroad program - in a summer when the news from
Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence. Kaplan
takes readers into the lives of these young women,
tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the
intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that
they found there. For all three women, France was far
from a passing fancy; rather, the year abroad continued
to influence them for the rest of their lives. Jackie
Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House
and to her later career as a book editor. Sontag
discovered the intellectual world she observed from afar
during that first year in Paris that would remain a key
influence for the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile,
found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense
of solidarity with the burgeoning Algerian independence
movement, which would inform her own revolutionary
agenda. Kaplan spins these three different stories into
one evocative biography and explores how a single year -
and a magical city - can change a whole life.
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