Julia Child, who belonged to my grandparents’ generation, describes day-to-day life in Paris right after World War II in a way American generations since have not experienced.
Actually, that’s not so true anymore–the 9/11 attacks and the prolonged political squabbling over a memorial, which Julie Powell describes tangentially in Julie & Julia, kept the rubble exposed to Manhattan’s downtown for years. Worse, if possible, the botched Bush Administration response to Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding counties even more permanently than the storms did.
But the U.S. is huge and even these events seem isolated from most Americans’ day-to-day reality.

