In 1925 Janet Flanner began dispatching her famous New Yorker "Letter from Paris, " from which most of the pieces in this collection are drawn. Together, they give an incomparable view of French political, social, and cultural life in the years between the electrifying debut of Josephine Baker and the evacuation of Paris at the outbreak of war. Flanner writes with equal eloquence of Isadora Duncan's art, Stavisky's swindling, and the Munich accord...