There’s been an awful lot of flak over the publication of Bringing Up Bébé (by Pamela Druckerman), but is anyone reading it? Is anyone taking the opportunity to learn something about how we could improve our parenting skills by learning from the wisdom of the French?

For admirers of France and the French there are seemingly dozens of patented clichés and descriptions about the way the country works and how its citizens act and react.

Susan Hochbaum has written a luscious guidebook to Paris pâtisseries with photographs of Paris pastries juxtaposed against Paris landmarks. Equally as charming is her personal narrative about the serendipitous connections that lead her to love, an extended Paris sabbatical and her popular new book, Pastry Paris: In Paris, Everything Looks Like Dessert.

Elaine Sciolino has written a thoughtful book in which she tries to define the French love of pleasure. Sciolino contents pleasure—and the art of extending it—are the basis of seduction, at least to the French. Call it persuasion or seduction, Anne McCarthy says Sciolino seduces withLa Seduction and in France, that's good.

Susan Hochbaum has written a luscious guidebook to Paris pâtisseries with photographs of Paris pastries juxtaposed against Paris landmarks. Equally as charming is her personal narrative about the serendipitous connections that lead her to love, an extended Paris sabbatical and her popular new book, Pastry Paris: In Paris, Everything Looks Like Dessert.

After fleeing an overbearing father, young Canadian John Glassco arrived in Paris determined to be a famous writer. He also flourished as a participant in the delicious debauchery and drama of 1920s Literary Paris. Thierry Picot says that served him well in this enjoyable and idiosyncratic take on expat Paris in the 1920s, Memoirs of Montparnasse.

Stephen Clarke's humorous novels A Year in the Merde and Merde Actually established the bestselling author as a Francophiles' favorite. Anne McCarthy catches up with Clarke, who fills us in on his current book, the next "Merde" novel, and the aggravations that inspire his books about a fictitious expat's pokes at the fascinating French.

In January 1910 over 2.5 million Parisians and the city of Paris were nearly washed away after the Seine rose 28 feet. Lives were lost, transportation was blocked and food shortages arose as personal losses swelled. Thierry Picot reviews Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910, a book about dark days in the City of Light.