Greater Journey (McCullough) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[McCullough] explores the intellectual legacy that France settled on its 19th-century visitors. The result is an epic of ideas, as well as an exhilarating book of spells…McCullough's grand tour is impressionistic and discursive, proceeding by way of crossed paths and capsule biographies. This is history to be savored rather than sprinted through, like a Parisian meal. It amounts to a meaty collection of short stories, expertly and flavorfully assembled, free of gristly theory.
Stacy Schiff - New York Times


The Greater Journey is a lively and entertaining panorama, with abundant details along the way. A parade must keep moving, and McCullough is a practiced hand at managing such a cast. His specialty is clarity. His voice is straightforward, more journalistic than literary despite its largely artistic subject matter.
Michael Sims - Washington Post


There is not an uninteresting page here as one fascinating character after another is explored at a crucial stage of his development.... Wonderful, engaging writing full of delighting detail.
John Barron - Chicago Sun-Times


From a dazzling beginning that captures the thrill of arriving in Paris.... The Greater Journey will satisfy McCullough's legion of loyal fans...it will entice a whole new generation of Francophiles, armchair travelers and those Americans lucky enough to go to Paris before they die.
Bruce Watson - San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) One of America’s most popular historians and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, McCullough (1776) has hit the historical jackpot. Travelers before the telephone era loved to write letters and journals, and McCullough has turned this avalanche of material into an entertaining chronicle of several dozen 19th-century Americans who went to Paris, an immense, supremely civilized city flowing with ideas, the arts, and elegance, where no one spit tobacco juice or defaced public property. They discovered beautiful clothing, delicious food, the art of dining ("The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," wrote John Sanderson). Paris had not only pleasures but professional attractions as well. Artists such as Samuel F.B. Morse, Whistler, Sargent, and Cassatt came to train. At a time when American medical education was fairly primitive, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and other prospective physicians studied at the Sorbonne’s vast hospitals and lecture halls—with tuition free to foreigners. Authors from Cooper to Stowe, Twain, and James sometimes took up residence. McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) A highly readable and entertaining travelogue of a special sort, an interdisciplinary treat from a tremendously popular Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.... Highly recommended.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) McCullough’s research is staggering to perceive, and the interpretation he lends to his material is impressive to behold.... Expect his latest book to ascend the best-seller lists and be given a place on the year-end best lists.
Booklist


(Starred review.) An ambitious, wide-ranging study of how being in Paris helped spark generations of American genius.... A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well
Kirkus Reviews