Perspective

Adam Gopnik used first person to tell the stories of his family's experiences in Paris. Usually, it was "I" but sometimes he wrote, "we." Essentially, the tales were told in present tense, which of course gave the reader a sense of being there at the moment, but he often used past tense to relate something that happened days or even weeks earlier. This mixture of tenses helped to keep the active verbs of present tense from becoming stale with overuse. Gopnik also included interviews and conversations to bring new perspectives to the book. He portrayed many interchanges with his family, friends, and acquaintances, sometimes offering long quotes that probably were not verbatim but were the closest reconstructions he could make of real conversations. He also clearly did research into both historical and contemporary topics, integrating this material smoothly into the narrative, so that it read as if these...