CITY OF LIGHT, CITY OF SHADOWS Paris in the Belle Epoque

The very word "Belle Epoque" is melodious to the ear. Not surprisingly, a particular appeal of this richly detailed history of France's most fabled era, beginning in 1871, is narrator Paul Daintry's deft rendering of proper names such as Eiffel, Toulouse-Lautrec, Clemenceau, and Proust. Daintry's voice is not the most silken, but he effectively delivers the clamor of a divided society that was destroying itself from within. The narrative covers art, architecture, and the role of women. But its center is novelist mile Zola's historic defense of the wrongly convicted Alfred Dreyfuss for treason. Daintry's gruff sophistication reflects the tumult, as well as the fertility, of that transitional era, whose contradictions would be resolved only by the outbreak of war in 1914. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2024]