I'm reviewing Paris, the secret history ...

 ... by Andrew Hussey, on my blog today.  A fascinating tome.  Read on to discover my thoughts ...

Having previously enjoyed Andrew Hussey’s Fracture France (see my review Here), I decided to have a look at some of his other books.  To my surprise, I found Paris: the secret history.  I took this to read whilst I was on my last trip to France.  What a fascinating book it is.

At 433 pages, it is an extensive look at the world-renowned city.  However, the content is divided into 9 sections, each covering a specific time frame.  If, as a reader, you need to ration your time, the book will easily accommodate that.  The first section takes you from prehistory up to AD 987.  The following parts covering various time frames right up to 2005, which at the time of publication in 2006, was the present day at that point.

There are some very useful illustrations included along with notes and references at the back.  There is a selected bibliography and an extensive index.  All of which means there is an opportunity for further reading if you choose, and an excellent aid to finding specific bits of history, places, or people, if you need to.

I read the book in its entirety across the month I spent in France.  It travelled with me as I explored the Les Alpes Mancelles and meandered along the route of the river Sarthe.  The narrative voice is clear and encouraging, and I never once had to think twice about picking up the book to continue my journey through the history of my favourite city.  Yes, this book is a vast history book, but in telling the story of Paris, Hussey is also telling the story of France, its culture, people, and psyche.  I can honestly say that it is quite a while since I have read such an informative narrative.  I'll be adding this book to my collection as it has duly earned its place on my bookshelf.  I’m also sure that I will be going back to it time after time, looking for answers as I continue my own wanderings throughout  France.

Please welcome, friend and author, Gregg Luke...

 ... to the blog today.  Hi Gregg, and thanks for making time in your busy schedule to be here today.  You write thrillers using your knowledge of science and medicine, and you have a book that was released last month.  Tell me a bit more about it... 

GL  In 1928 London, Helen Clarke has only one goal: keep her eight-year-old daughter Peggy alive.  But Peggy has contracted a disease that is almost certainly a death sentence, and Helen is single, homeless, and penniless.  When her desperate attempts to save Peggy fail, she turns to St. Mary’s Hospital—and to a young doctor whose unconventional approach to healing may be Peggy’s only hope.  While neither adult has any objective other than saving Peggy, their close association and combined efforts develop into an unexpected romance.

The one assurance Helen hangs on to is the powerful premonitions she’s had about Peggy’s future and her participation in something world-changing.  The question is whether those premonitions are an actual promise or simply the desperate hope of a mother determined to save her only child.

AW And why a setting of London?

GL  I set Premonitions in 1928 London because it was a landmark year for medicine.  It was sometime around the first of September that Dr Alexander Fleming discovered the penicillin effect while working at St. Mary’s Hospital.  But it wasn’t until ten years later that penicillin was finally isolated and mass-produced.  Up until that time, there was seemingly no way to combat lethal infections such as staphylococcus, streptococcus, clostridium, and all other deadly bacterial infections.  In fact, in all wars leading up to WWII, more people died from infections than from bombs, bullets, and bayonets.  Children were especially susceptible because of underdeveloped immune systems and poor hygiene of the period.  London was especially hard hit because of poor sanitation, sketchy water sources, and extreme poverty in many areas.  There were alternative therapies available, but the medical attitudes about infections were stuck in traditional theories of miasma and the four humors.  Acceptance of germ theory was still in its infancy.

Enter Helen Clarke.  Raised in a poor family that struggled for day-to-day subsistence, they did everything they could to survive.  When she had daughter Peggy out of wedlock, things rapidly went from bad to worse.  Now, finding herself homeless and penniless, Peggy contracts what Helen mistakes as typhoid fever.  Because Dr Almroth Wright, the inventor of the typhoid vaccination is at St. Mary’s, she seeks out his help, only to discover that Wright is semi-retired and Alexander Fleming is now department head.  Dr Fleming tells her that the vaccination only works if given before an infection.  But rather than sending her away, he has Peggy brought to the Urgent Care unit of St, Mary’s, where Helen meets the young, handsome Dr August Gardner, a newly licensed physician who recognizes the numerous limitations of contemporary medical practices and is willing to try new ideas.  Premonitions is their story of discovery, trust, resilience, determination, love, and premonitions about Peggy’s future.

about the author... Gregg Luke grew up in Santa Barbara, California, and developed a love for reading and writing at an early age.  He pursued his formal education in Biological Sciences at SBCC, UCSB, and BYU.  He completed his schooling at the University of Utah, College of Pharmacy, including an informative rotation with the Utah Poison Control Center.

Gregg is a lover of all things science, particularly natural sciences, and loves teaching about writing, medicine, and health.  He is a prolific reader and writer of fiction and nonfiction and uses his medical knowledge to write plausible, gritty thrillers.  He is the author of thirteen suspense novels, two suspense novellas, and a nonfiction book about Medicines and the Gospel.  He currently lives in Northern Utah.

about the book … Helen Clarke’s eight-year-old daughter Peggy had contracted a disease that was all but a death sentence to children in 1928 London. Single, homeless, and penniless, Helen tried to treat Peggy on her own, but her daughter rapidly deteriorated. In desperation, Helen seeks help at St. Mary’s Hospital, where she meets August Gardner, a young doctor whose approach to healing often clashes with the day's conventional medical wisdom. Focused on saving her only child, Helen finds herself in turmoil, having had premonitions about Peggy’s important future versus the dire state her daughter now clings to. Had Helen’s premonitions been a lie? Was Peggy’s future simply wishful thinking on her part? Would her daughter even live to see the next day, let alone a predestined future?

As Helen and August struggle to find a cure for a typically incurable disease, their association quickly grows into more than a friendship. But the last thing on Helen’s mind is a romantic relationship. In addition to keeping Peggy alive one more day, she must now navigate a future she’d never thought possible. And yet, as desirous as that future sounded, if it didn’t include her precious daughter, was it one worth living?

You can follow Gregg on his Website, his Amazon Author Page and on Facebook

You can get his book Here

Please welcome, friend and author, Arthur Lee...

... to the blog today.  Hi Arthur, and thanks for making time to be here today.  Your current book is Thin Places, a collection of short writings.  So, what first got you into writing and why?

AL In the first grade, I wrote a story called “The Rainbow Goes to Japan.”  It was all of one page, maybe 30 words total, but my teacher loved it and nominated me to go to this program we had called “Young Authors.”  It was a conference where you got to meet real published authors and read your story in front of an audience too.  It maybe sounds cliché, but it really was life changing.  There was something about writing stories and sharing them that I loved, even from early on.  So, the desire to write never really left me.  But when I went back to college in my 30s, I fell in love with it again, more deeply anyway.  That’s when it became more of a necessity for me.  I felt like I had to write—for my own sake.  Publication has just been a bonus.

AW  You write poetry, creative essays and other written wanderings – and that’s a description I’ve not come across before!  What is the springboard, or inspiration, for these forms of writing and is it the same for all of them?

AL You are right.  The market for poetry and literary/creative nonfiction is very small.  I always joke there is no money in poetry and essays.  There’s some truth to that, but that’s okay because I’ve never been in it for the money.  I am a huge fan of essayists like Brian Doyle and poets like Mary Oliver, among many others.  I also love Walt Whitman (AW Me too) and Zora Neale Hurston and Leo Tolstoy and Ray Bradbury (who, by the way, is more poet than fantasy writer, I’d argue).  So, these writers certainly influenced and inspired my writing early on.  But beyond published writers, honestly, everyone and everything around me is an inspiration.  I believe there isn’t any truth that nature can’t teach us, if we observe and listen deeply.  And that belief holds true for human nature too, which is just a subset of the first.  I am constantly in awe of the people I come across and come in contact with.  And the more I meet people, the more I realize everyone has a powerful story to tell, stories they need to tell.  More than that, everyone is a story, made up of a thousand chapters, and all of them are worth reading.  So people, their struggles, their resiliency, their weaknesses and strengths, their broken hearts and their scars which are testaments to healing—they are my ultimate inspiration.

AW Have you tried/dabbled with other genres/forms of writing for other media other than the printed word?

AL I’ve published a few poems in traditional poetry journals.  But beyond poetry and essays, I’ve pretty much dabbled in it all.  I’ve written screenplays, self-help, and MG/YA fiction.  I’m currently working on a stage play too.  Back in 2009, I wrote and self-published a MG western called Partners Again.  It isn’t in print anymore, but it did well on the west coast (where I’m from) and gave me the opportunity to go into a lot of schools across WA, OR, and ID talking about the book and teaching creative writing.  I am working on a second collection of essays now and then I hope the timing is right to sit down and write a novel.

AW Famous authors such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas had a special space for writing. Do you have a writing shed of your own?

AL First, I’ve loved Roald Dahl since I was young.  And Dylan Thomas is a powerful poet. When I was in my twenties, I put a lot of time into creating a writing space.  But I did that more because it seemed like a writer thing to do, and not because the space was any more sacred than another.  I would love to have my own writing place, like Thoreau, in a cabin in the woods, but for me, right now, it is more about wherever I can find peace and quiet.  It can be anywhere, but I am most comfortable in the corner of my room, at my computer, with my side window looking out over nature.  Around me are several literary posters I designed, but the one right in front boasts this favorite stanza of mine from a T.S. Eliot poem: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”  Also, this snippet from a much larger quote by the late essayist Brian Doyle, “I believe with all my hoary heart that stories save lives, and the telling of them and hearing of them is a holy thing, powerful far beyond our ken…”

Arthur's first story

AW And finally, what would your eight-year-old self think and say about you and your achievements today?

AL Eight years old?  That would make it 1987, and I probably would have just spent a good couple hours watching cartoons, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  So, this is actually pretty easy.  I know exactly what I would say, not being as verbose then as I am now.  I’d look at my older self, nod my head, and say, “Radical!”  Then I’d go back to watching cartoons.

about the author… Washington-born and -raised, Arthur Thomas Lee resides in Idaho, surrounded by nature.  He has a degree in English from BYU-Idaho.  He is a full-time dad.  He has, over the years, been lucky in writing and business but even luckier in love.  With the benefit of hindsight, he says, we are all able to look back and recognize moments when our lives changed for the better.  That was true for him each time one of his four sons came into the world.  He thought he could not get any luckier.  Then he did.  After a period of heartache and hardship, he met Renee.  She was not in his life, and then, one day, suddenly, she was.  That, too, became true for her three kids.  Arthur and Renee married in 2024, finding purpose in the paths preceding their union, and a set of hands to hold along the path that lies ahead.

about the book… There is, across the globe, an ever-growing disconnect.  People everywhere are divided by borders and boundaries and walls—if not geographically, then certainly as they pertain to our convictions and the untamed country that is the human heart.  Among so much dissonance, how attainable then is harmony?  And where, at last, is it to be found?

In his debut collection of interconnected personal essays and poetry, Arthur Thomas Lee introduces us to myriads of individuals not unlike ourselves, people whose stories hold, between their lines, keys to greater compassion and understanding.  To that end, Thin Places: Portraits, Prayers, and Liminal Grace takes us on a lyrical journey through which nature becomes our ever-present guide, difference gives way to deference, patchwork paths find purpose, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and each stranger—fighting for light in the thick of understory—transforms into familiar lifelong companion.  It is, at once, a heart-felt prayer, a bold beck and call for love in the face of deep division, and for greater measures of grace along the way—all while passing our time, our limited time, on this our liminal planet.

featured review… In Lee’s heartfelt essays, the quiet joys and tragedies of life—marriage, divorce, injuries, births, deaths—prompt meditations on regrowth.  The result is an entertaining and often moving homage to daily existence. A luminous collection with potent metaphors and gorgeously earthy writing.

You can follow Arthur on his Website  on  Facebook  Instagram  and on his  Amazon Author Page 

You can get the book in e-, print-, or Audio-format  Here 

I'm continuing my journey following the Granville-Paris Express...

Photo courtesy of Pixabay and Wikimedia

 ... and I've finally reached Paris.  This will be my final post in this series.  Read on... 

I’ve reached my final destination on this particular journey, and what an interesting and unusual travelogue this has been.  But I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the posts as much as I have enjoyed the research and the writing.

Although the end for the Granville-Paris express was catastrophic in some respects, for me, the arrival at the last stop is a bitter disappointment.  Read on.

Gare Montparnasse was originally named Gare de l’Ouest and was one of the central termini across the city of Paris.  It was opened in 1840 and was a glowing example of mid-nineteenth century architecture, as old photos demonstrate.  The architect was Louis Visconti, and the original building had footfall of 490,000 passengers annually as early as 1844.

In 1852, a second station was built a little further down the track, which enabled expansion to cope with the ever-increasing traffic, the addition of new lines, and the then fashion for train travel.  The passenger traffic had expanded to 1.4 million by1854 and had become a major hub for the Compagnie chemin-de-fer de l’Ouest.

In 1895, when the travellers on The Paris Express arrived at around four in the afternoon, it would have been the second building that they saw.  We now only have the old photos of those original buildings and, of course, the photo of the crash that was published in newspapers across the world.

Amazingly, there was only one fatality, Marie Aguilard, the newspaper seller whose kiosk was directly below the site of the incident.  She had taken over from her husband temporarily whilst he went to collect the next edition.  Some of the passengers and crew received some minor injuries, and the other passengers waiting for the train were similarly lucky.  Naturally, the damage resulting from the crash was repaired, and the station continued to serve the people of Paris.

The coming of the great exhibition in 1900 brought further expansion and the creation of new routes.  The twentieth century was a key turning point for Paris Montparnasse.  In 1944, the station became a landmark.  On August 25^th, General Leclerc accepted the surrender of General von Choltitz within the confines of the station, and the liberation of Paris began.  Some twenty years later, during the 60s and 70s, the station was reconstructed and integrated into a vast urban project.  In 1969 the old station was demolished, and the Tour Montparnasse was constructed as a memorial and included alongside the vast complex of glass and steel that we now see today.  The new station, designed by Eugéne Beaudouin and Urbain Cassan, now has a footfall of 50 million travellers a year.  That’s a lot of people, and I have to wonder how many of them know what happened on October 22^nd, 1895... 

You can catch up with the previous posts in this series by clicking the following links: Granville part 1, Granville part 2, Vire, Flers, Briouze, Argentan Surdon and Dreux.  My review of the book, The Paris Express, is Here