Paris On Air is the first memoir from Oliver Gee the charismatic host of the popular podcast about Paris, The Earful Tower. I'm a huge fan of this podcast because I absolutely adore Paris and have visited twice and I love how real Oliver makes Paris feel to all of us. He strolls through the streets, interviews countless famous Paris residents, and feeds us bite sized pieces of Paris to satisfy those of us that need a "fix" in between trips there and giving those that dream of a trip to Paris something to hang onto until they can see the real thing. In Paris On Air Oliver recounts every step of his life in Paris as an Aussie native. From his first tiny apartment (aren't they all tiny), trying to figure out the language, building a circle of friends, and optimistically stepping into his first cheese shop to making the leap from reporter to podcaster, a birthday party in a chateau, and the ultimate honeymoon trip around France on a scooter, Oliver shares his Paris story with us in an honest, clever, and funny style.
This is his Paris story, not a guide to Paris, and for those of us who can only dream of pulling up roots and rent a little pied-a-terre, Oliver's Paris stories make us believe that our dreams are possible.
For lovers of all things Paris, treat yourself to this book!
In January 2015, the journalist Oliver Gee originally of Australia found himself reassigned to Paris to cover the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper. He has lived in Paris since.
This memoir of living, befriending basketballers, neighbors, and others; marrying his lady love; and becoming something of a Francophone while developing his new career as a podcaster. Oliver Gee hosts Earful Tower where he talks about the popular culture aspects of Paris. Some of his podcast and Patreon followers travel around Paris, visiting the places Gee describes.
Gee remains grateful for and humbled by his success. I think his success is due to his grateful, humble, accessible self.
I listened to one podcast on Scribd. I may listen to another. I smiled, imagining I understood the humor about French culture.
To be fair, I am prejudiced, because I have followed the author’s podcast and other media for several years. My daughter has been going to a university in Paris the last 4 years, and she recommended the author’s podcast, The Earful Tower. The podcast is wonderful, and Oliver Gee’s window on Paris every week has helped me feel closer to my daughter. Oliver’s interviews make you feel like you are in the same room, and it is impossible not to like him, and you can tell his many contacts in Paris, including mayors of arrondissements, feel the same way.
Being a supporter of the podcast, I bought the book, more as a show of support as opposed to expecting a great read. After all, Oliver talks for a living not writes, correct? Well I was wrong. This is great, fast-moving account of 5 years in Paris, where the author started from nothing immediately after the 2015 terror attacks, with no friends, and ending with a wonderful wife, a career, and a home in Paris.
The book is very well-written, and reflects Oliver’s self-awareness, good humor, and high emotional IQ. If you want to go for a fast-paced, fun ride in Paris, and actually around France, read this book. You won’t be sorry.
I am a Parisian and a French woman and very in love with my city. So I am always happy to see that this love is shared. And I discover Oliver Gee's Podcastwork recently but was very enthusisastic about his job and I listened all of the episodes in a quite short time. And the publishing of his book arrived luckily also in the perfect timing : Lockdown in France. I had quite some difficulty to focus on anything and reading was as never before not so easy for me but it was before I started Oliver's book. I really enjoyed reading his life adventure in Paris. It was the perfect distraction and I had a lot of fun that is very precious in this difficult time. I highly recommend the reading of this book. It cheers you up.
Great story and good fun read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend it. I downloaded the ebook from TheEarfulTower.com, finished it over the weekend and found myself wishing there were more to read! I discovered Oliver’s videos and podcast while researching a now postponed trip to Paris. His enthusiastic and humorous style, insights and interesting guests are a wonderful look at life and living in Paris. This book is equally entertaining, humorous and insightful. As a youtube and podcast subscriber it is great to have some background on the cast of regular characters; the basketball mates, the Red Beast, Baxter, and of course Lina. Many favorite parts but, without spoiling anything, the top of the list included “the shrug”, the gift of the Red Beast, the birthday chateau and the realization that Paris is not France and France is not Paris. I'm looking forward to the US book tour so I can get an autographed hard copy.
A wonderfully enchanting book! Oliver Gee’s stories of his first few years living and working as an expat in Paris are delightful. His stories are both hilarious and relatable, especially if you’ve ever lived abroad. (I couldn’t help but think of all the embarrassing language mistakes I made while living in Japan while I was reading this book.) I also really appreciated his ability to see cultural differences as simply two unique ways of looking at things. He doesn’t push the narrative of “my way is right and their way is weird.” Instead, he tries to understand how it works there and adapts. Gee has an infectious interest in all the tiny details of a city and its people, and if you love following along on a fun cultural ride, this book is for you.
This is gem of a book. The storytelling is fresh. His writing style is clean and punchy. Best of all, the author makes the most of the geographic backdrop: Paris. Oliver's liberal use of the details of his Parisian surroundings add a wealth of delightful context to his well-told stories. This is indeed a good read.
A wonderful and refreshing book from Oliver Gee about his first years in Paris. Even though I knew many of the stories from his wonderful podcast it was still very interesting and a real page turner and filled with surprises. Oliver's positive attitude comes through the pages. It's the perfect light book we need right now.
LOVED this book! Oliver Gee’s writing style is as engaging as his content. The book is a memoir of his first five years living in Paris, and what amazing years they were. You’ll laugh and empathize with his great variety of experiences becoming a Parisian, from Marie Antoinette at his bday BASH in a chateau, no less - to lovely mother Mary, who sheltered him so long ago. And, if you like romance, you’ll also love the story of his meeting and wooing his beautiful, talented wife. Thx, Oliver Gee, for helping us beat the coronavirus blues 🎶. And write another book for us!
This book should be essential reading for anyone planning to live in Paris, short or long term. In a delightful story of his introduction to all things French Oliver Gee’s account resonates with my own experiences. I wish I’d had something like that to read before my first visit. Oliver’s style is light and amusing and eminently readable. Buy it, try it, then book your ticket. In the meantime, check his podcast, ‘The Earful Tower’. (This is Barbara Barko's review.)
For anyone from somewhere else who has dreamed of living in Paris, Oliver Gee’s memoir is a treat. It wasn’t easy (although simplified by his mom having a British passport); Oliver shares his challenges and triumphs with good humor. I inhaled the book in a couple of days. I smiled, I smirked, I laughed out loud. His easy conversational style left me feeling as if we were already friends. His podcast, The Earful Tower, is also engaging. Try it!
This book was a walk down memory lane for me but for all you Francophiles it is an amazing book of how to navigate France...either as a tourist an ex pat. I loved EVERY page! Oliver’s voice is in every sentence..his down to earth Australian way comes through and takes you on his journey...you can’t help but feel like you are there with him! I truly loved EVERY page ... and it IS a page turner! Thank you so much Oliver for letting us in on the way to navigate French life...for all its good and not so good .. Oliver’s explanation of French people and French bureaucracy makes it all seem so much easier. This book should appeal to anyone with a love of France. Well done and thank you Oliver is also the man behind the hugely popular podcast The Earful Tower....he knows Paris and if he doesn’t he is willing to learn...
In 1921, Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris with his wife Hadley as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. They found a tiny apartment in a neighborhood of drunks and beggars, which the writer himself describes in “A Moveable Feast" as “a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container.”
But the talented and ambitious journalist, looking for something more, was also writing short stories. He soon became part of the circle of artists and writers around the legendary Gertrude Stein, hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. It was part competition and part collaboration, a creative dynamic that grew its own nutrients.
During a brief return to Toronto, where Hadley gave birth to their son, Hemingway resigned from the Star and the family returned to Paris. These were not easy days for them. Unable to sell his short fiction, he had no income and a family to feed. Yet, just five years after first arriving in the City of Light, “The Sun Also Rises” was published and the rest, to risk a cliche, is literary history.
I’d begun listening to Oliver Gee’s podcast, The Earful Tower, during 2019 as I was planning what turned out to be not one, but two trips to Paris from the U.S. that year. I’d also gotten into studying both late-19th century Paris and the Paris between the wars, the time of the Impressionists and the time of the ex-pat authors.
As I began reading Gee’s debut book, “Paris on Air,” Hemingway’s history came to mind. Gee came to Paris as a foreign correspondent for a Swedish newspaper in early 2015, finding a 215-square foot, seven-floor walkup apartment, one of the 100,000 former maid’s quarters now often rented to students or as AirBnBs. A little more than two years later, he quit the news job, having established an audience for his nascent talk show but before figuring out how to make it pay.
Today, Gee is married, lives in a nicer apartment and hosts a podcast that gets props from The New York Times. “Paris on Air” is his memoir of that five-year transformational period, which he, unlike Hemingway, has considerately published while still alive.
If you have not listened to the Earful Tower podcasts, do so now, before reading the book. Gee’s strength as a podcaster — more correctly, a talk-show host, because that’s what the Earful Tower is — resides in his talent as an interviewer, his ability to put guests at ease, to draw them out, and to create conversations that we all want to be a part of. Reading “Paris on Air” is much like listening to the podcasts. Often, the author speaks directly to the reader, as if you were tuned in live. The memoir is a conversation, and the reader is in on it, from the introduction to the last page.
In Hemingway’s time, there were writers, artists, poets, photographers, dancers, musicians, all walking the streets of Montparnasse in the sixth arrondissement. Now there are content creators, and Gee established himself among them as Hemingway did among his contemporaries. Gee’s friends, collaborators and competitors are an eclectic mix of YouTubers, bloggers, vloggers and Instagrammers along with well-known journalists, best-selling authors, models and famed chefs.
The set piece of “Paris on Air” is Gee’s story of how he proposed to Lina, now his wife. After she said yes on the Pont du Carrousel bridge on a rainy night, the couple headed to the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz, where Papa celebrated the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Whether or not there is a best-seller in Gee’s future, I’m sure we’ll hear about it on his podcast.
If you are missing Paris because your trip was postponed or because you can’t leave your arrondissement, then this is the perfect book for you. Oliver Gee, the host of The Earful Tower, has written his memoir and it is wonderful.
He adores Paris, and this love is evident throughout. Plus he’s not afraid to speak to Parisians, so he meets some fabulous people and shares their Paris stories. I really enjoyed wandering the streets of Paris with him. Then visiting the French countryside, as he and his wife Lina, set off on an epic honeymoon seeing France by scooter!
I love a good move to Paris story and this is one of the best.
I highly recommend this wonderful first book by Oliver Gee! Please consider contacting him directly for an order in lieu of getting a copy from other on line sources. I have been a loyal follower of Oliver Gee’s podcast, The Earful Tower, for several years. He is a talented, charismatic, intelligent and kind journalist turned podcaster who is now, with the release of Paris On Air, officially an author as well. This book is a must read for anyone who has already visited France or has yet to discover all it has to offer. Oliver Gee shares, with equal doses of wit, passion, detail, and engaging stories, his life in Paris these past five years. Through his stories, the reader learns about the generosity and kindness of Parisians and other French citizens who will warmly greet you if you are willing to take the same risks of adventure as Oliver Gee. I read the book in two days and it was a perfect antidote to my sadness in having to postpone an April trip to Paris. Well done and thank you, Oliver Gee
I’m an Australian who has been visiting Paris and France every year for more than 20 years. This book brings back so many memories of both the joys and challenges of spending time in this beautiful country. I was to have been in Paris this month for my annual visit and to visit my family but was unable to go because of the Covid19 pandemic. This book helped me feel I was back once more in Paris walking around the same streets and areas discussed in the book. As with his podcasts and videos, I love how Oliver brings a very personal and intimate feel to his writing. His genuineness and engaging personality shine through and it is easy to see how he has been embraced and accepted by the French people and followed by Francophiles from all around the world.
I finished the book this morning, after starting it yesterday. It’s a wonderful look into moving and living in Paris and provides some insights to the culture. The descriptions brought me back to Paris, and have given me wanderlust to finally visit the other parts of France. This is a great read, and can be supplemented with You Tube videos and podcasts at The Earful Tower. Take a trip to Paris (and France) while you’re in home quarantine, you won’t regret it.
What a lovely book about Paris, romance, France, and the life of an Australian podcaster and his Swedish bride. Oliver Gee is a wonderful, charming, and engaging podcaster. Who knew that he could translate those traits to writing a memoir? Well, he did it. Not only was the book sharply written, there was also a great flow. He begins with his proposal to Lovely Lina, and then manages to weave his way from his first days in Paris, to the proposal, on up to today. (Well, not today. The book is written pre-pandemic. Thank goodness. It makes it a great escape as well.)
I'm a Francophile and proud supporter of the Earful Tower and Oliver Gee. So add to the list, I'm now a proud supporter of Oliver Gee's writing too!
Highly recommended. Aussie fish out of water talks about moving to Paris and making it his home. Listen to the The Earful Tower on your podcaster of choice before or after you read this book.
I really, really enjoyed this book! Oliver Gee’s first book is a refreshing, romping read of his first five years living in Paris. It’s a love story – falling in love with this city, his new podcast, the lovely Lina, and of course, the Alp Slayer (affectionately known as the Red Beast). This is the perfect book for every wannabe Parisian, one of the best of its genre that I’ve read. By the time I turned the final page, I felt that I had been educated (I now know what the dot in the letter “i” is called), I learnt a couple of French words I truly hope never to use (for example, défenestrer), empathised with Oliver on some truly awful French lessons he experienced during his early times in Paris, and relived some of his lovely and zaney podcast episodes from the last couple of years. Oliver brings Paris and France to life through his words and experiences – I didn’t want the pages to end. Five stars for a truly delightful, well written book that I am sure I will pick up again and again over the years.
A tale well told of a man who takes on Paris with forgivable unease, but punctuates it with fearless leaps into each new story in his life. I love the grim appearance of bad luck just when life was going almost too well, balanced by sudden heroic good luck when the situation was at its worst. Oliver makes you cheer him on as he rides.
A fabulously entertaining recount of the author’s adventures from when he first thought of moving to Paris to eventually settling there. Highly recommended!
“Paris on Air” is overflowing with “joie de vivre”! With each chapter I felt as if I was enjoying (and sharing) countless French delicacies w/ good friends. How M. Gee managed to capture the many layers of exploring, establishing and enjoying life in Paris (and France) is remarkable and a delight to read.
Are you ready to get transported to Paris for a multidimensional and romantic love story? Paris on Air is the book for you!
Oliver's premier book is a post-coming of age, coming of age, memoir.
Paris on Air is complex as a love story because Oliver leads us through him falling in love with Paris, a new career he pioneers for himself, new friends and community, and the love of his life, Lovely Lina.
Oliver bares his heart in an authentic and expressive voice that makes you smile, laugh, whisper French phrases, and tear up along the journey with him. The reader roots for Oliver from the very first page and you will find yourself celebrating every milestone, kerfuffle and accomplishment along with him.
He is an enchanting storyteller and his journalist background and adventurer spirit bring his readers a bird’s eye view of Paris, his adventures, and the fascinating people we meet along the way.
Oliver knows how to bring life to places and people in written and spoken word in a truly unique way, bringing us the heart and soul of each person he introduces us to along his journey.
Paris on Air is a delight to the senses, it will take you on an adventure and vacation during a time we all truly need to be transported…what better place to go than Paris on Air?
I laughed, I cried, I ooo’d and ahhh’d...this is a really wonderful, feel good book! As a Francophile who dreams of traveling to Paris someday, this book was the next best thing. Love this author and his Podcast, The Earful Tower, and I would highly recommend anything he is involved with!
Absolutely loved this book. A lovely, light-hearted, honest story about moving to the City of Lights - I ignored my phone and read the whole thing in one day. It reminded me why I love Paris, and France, and got me laughing out loud to the point I had to explain to friends nearby. A great read!
Oliver Gee is the Australian host of the hugely popular podcast The Earful Tower exploring the lesser-known parts of Paris and Parisians. His enthusiastic, engaging style translates perfectly to the printed word with this entertaining memoir about his arrival and life in Paris. There are plenty of funny anecdotes about his early 'faux pas' with French culture, why bringing fresh fruit to work is a mistake, and a wedding day to remember (but not for the usual reasons). But there are also perceptive insights in adapting to the French way of life, making French friends and feeling at home in France. An excellent read for anyone who loves Paris and / or dreams of living there. Oh, and check out the podcast as well to brighten up your week.
This first time book by Oliver Gee sweeps you with him on an extremely entertaining and informative journey as he navigates the delights and pitfalls of a stranger in a strange city - Paris, the City of Lights.
His perspective is both humorous and insightful, his story told in an engaging and congenial style that clearly reflects Oliver’s keen eye and a natural joie de vivre that jumps out from every page.
I would highly recommend this book to anybody who has an affection for Paris, has plans to visit Paris or would just like to learn more about this fascinating city.
Whilst the book title is catchy, I can’t help but think it might be better sub titled “The Story so Far” – I am sure that there will be more to come from this talented author and I look forward to the next installment of his life and times as a podcaster and indeed ambassador of Paris.
BTW, Oliver has recently completed an audio version of Paris on Air, which brings another dimension to the story and it is well worth listening to.