“Paris: The Secret History”, by Andrew Hussey

512 pages, Bloomsbury USA, ISBN-13: 978-1596913233

Paris: The Secret History by Andrew Hussey is not the first history of Paris that I have read: there was Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne (reviewed on January 27, 2014); Paris: The Biography of a City by Colin Jones (reviewed on February 19, 2015); and even Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count by Jill Jonnes (reviewed on April 23, 2014). Without question Hussey’s work is inferior to above three…oh, it isn’t a bad book, I guess; rather engaging at times, really, as Hussey seeks to bring the seedier – that is, “secret” – side of Paris into the light, a blood drenched, often gripping tale of the glittering world capital that offsets the glamorous and polished image the very name evokes, the image the above-mentioned works emphasize (although they by no means ignore the dark as they write about the light). But Hussey’s book is a rather stilted affair, rushing through hundreds of years and dozens of events as he seeks to cover as much as he can in 500 pages-or-so. But once he reaches the Second Empire period, the book goes decidedly downhill, with Hussey throwing in too many of his personal hobgoblins and opinions. Far from revealing any “secrets”, too often this book reads like a minimally organized pastiche of historical snippets commonly accessible to any grade-school student researching Paris. Too much of the text is of superficial paragraphs, as if Hussey couldn’t even stay interested enough to sustain any intellectual progression of thought; if there is anything positive to be said about this deceptively-titled book, it is that its inadequacies can serve to encourage interested readers to pursue further information in other books or resources – like, say, the three reviewed par moi above.