A mecca for modernists (and for many of their postmodernist successors as well), Paris has continued to lead a charmed life in the history of Western culture. For the last couple of centuries, the city has attracted tourists and expatriates, students and artists who have yearned to lift themselves out of the humdrum and high into the empyrean. Such an aura makes the first word of Alice Kaplan's title especially apt, because the three American women who inspire her book “dreamed about France long before they ever crossed the ocean. Paris, and the French language, existed in their imaginations, even in their parents' imaginations.” Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis “went abroad accompanied by the ghosts of ancestors and the echoes of public conversations” (4–5). These encounters, which were inaugurated in three distinct postwar decades, could scarcely be unmediated. Each woman hungered to find in France what she already sought and expected, and therefore Dreaming in French is as much about how their ambitions – social, intellectual, civic – were shaped before leaving the United States as it is about what they found abroad, and how their lives were changed.

Inevitably their impressions of Paris were drenched in stereotypes (or – to be charitable – archetypes). The glamour, ease, pleasure, and sophistication associated with this mecca were distinguishable from, say, Mecca. And although Kaplan's trio happened to share beauty as well as brains, they were sufficiently unalike one another to enable the author to devise a richly variegated and subtly illuminating set of portraits. The first was a Catholic, an East Coast debutante who would marry the most admired American President of the second half of the twentieth century. The second was a Jewish intellectual from the West Coast – and the only one not to come for the sake of studying at the Sorbonne. (She also exhibited the most sustained engagement with French culture, and is buried at Montparnasse.) The third was a black southerner whose radicalism briefly installed her on the FBI's Most Wanted list. The only one of the trio still alive, she nevertheless declined to cooperate with the author. They did not know one another, but the reader of Dreaming in French comes to know them well. Like the espresso served in those legendary Left Bank cafés (how easily the clichés come!), this is a book to savor.

Kaplan's sympathy for her subjects is understandable, but sometimes critical distance is the cost she pays. For example, she notes that a biographer of André Malraux, who dedicated his Anti-Memoirs to Jacqueline Kennedy, mentions how suavely she could talk to the minister of culture about books – even those “she hasn't read.” Kaplan rises to the defense by citing the former First Lady's “career as an editor and the public auction of her personal library of three thousand volumes” (66), which hardly proves that she read them. But the chief weakness of this admirable book is political, however. The linguistic competence of the First Lady became a famous asset in 1961, when the First Family visited Paris, where she managed to charm the public – if not necessarily its President. “My grandparents were French” was the gambit she is supposed to have used to soften up Charles de Gaulle. “So were mine, Madame,” was his curt reply. But Kaplan fails to catch the significance of the visit itself, which was to buttress NATO at its weakest spot (the Elysée Palace), especially after a harrowing meeting that President Kennedy had with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Nor does Kaplan indicate how big a pain in the alliance de Gaulle was perceived to be, leading the monolingual Commander-in-Chief to try to learn some French (not Russian) on the side, even as he envied his wife's fluency.

Because the prosecution in 1971 of Angela Davis galvanized her supporters among the French intelligentsia, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom she had studied a decade earlier, Dreaming in French offers a detailed account of a bloody episode a year before. A shootout in Marin County had led to the deaths of a judge and two prisoners, plus the younger brother of another prisoner, George Jackson, whose cause Davis had championed. The guns had been registered in her name. But why did she need to own four guns? (And was the philosophy professor even trained in the use of firearms?) Serving as co-counsel in her own defense, she explained to the jury how much danger permeated the lives of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama, where she had been born and raised until attending a high school in New York City; hence the psychic mandate of self-defense (202). But Davis was living in urban California, not in Klan country, and Kaplan shows surprisingly little skepticism about such self-exculpation. Whatever its truthfulness, the series of terrible events that culminated in this trial, at which Davis was acquitted, was a reminder of how nightmares can infiltrate dreams.