Olivier Magny's witty, insightful book was culled from the blog of the same name. Lots of these blog-to-book content repurposings don't surivive the journeys (I was underwhelmed by Other People's Rejection Letters: Relationship Enders, Career Killers, and 150 Other Letters You'll Be Glad You Didn't Receive, for example), but this one does. The secrets are the writer's great humor and the pinpoint editing of the book: the pieces build perfectly on each other, with each succeeding entry (er, 'chapter') winkingly invoking a term Magny presented in an earlier post. In each new entry, Magny covers a specific subject, term or concept near and dear to Parisians. These run from one-and-a-half to three pages. Each feels of the perfect length.The overall tone of Magny's writing: celebrating the superiority of Parisians while letting you, the reader, in on the secret that maybe this superiority is not so well-founded. It mixes droll moments of well-informed comedic observations with suddenly trenchant, sharp comments. Of those latter thoughts, I often found myself finishing a paragraph coming up startled thinking, "whoa, that wasn't light and funny, it was sharp, targeted and dead-on."Or, as Mr. Magny tells me of Parisian-speak, I should say "sharp, targeted, dead-on..." to truly affect "the power of the Parisian tertiary rhythm." He also tells me that "[t]o achieve full...rhythm, two rules ought to be applied: never use "and" before your last adjective; and always finish the list looking somewhat sad and disturbed" (from his entry entitled 'Making Lists').God, that is such great stuff. Then, to reinforce my point about how the book builds on its previous chapters, in a later entry entitled 'Barack Obama,' he uncorks this beauty in his 'How to Sound Like a Parisian' example (one accompanies each chapter): "Oh, putain, I mean Barack Obama...he's in a different league: charisma, intelligence, elegance...Plus I mean congratulations to him." That sentence put together lessons learned in 'Making Lists' and 'The Word 'Putain'.' By reading Olivier Magny's excellent compendium, I feel like I'm in on the joke.