Why Do Americans Love France So Much?

I live in the center of Paris, a hundred yards from the Seine. Every day I walk along it, or cross one of the bridges that link the Left Bank to the Right. As someone who grew up along the Mississippi, I almost require the sight of a dirty brown stream to feel normal and happy, and thus am the ideal reader for Elaine Sciolino’s well-researched book The Seine: The River That Made Paris, which will tell the reader all there is to know about it. Rivers have always symbolized escape, but these days in Paris, its free flowing taunts. No one can travel to the US, itself riddled with the coronavirus, or to any of the other countries whose borders are closed. I had planned to take my husband’s ashes back to California; he died of Covid-19 last March, one of the earliest victims, infected in a French hospital.