Jeremy Mercer Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespear

Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

Jeremy Mercer

St. Martin's, Nov 2005, $23.95

ISBN: 0312347391

Ottawa Times Jeremy Mercer explains the metric that allows you to know how well you are doing as a crime reporter is simple: the murder rate in the city. Whereas Ottawa is 20-25 annually, Toronto is more like 50. The higher the rate, the more important the assignment is. Only in his twenties, Jeremy assumes he has a long career ahead of him, even if he sees everything from the dark side, such as an adult male with a child has to be a pedophile not a father. However, everything changes when he writes a book that quotes an informant claiming a successful robbery, but he names the person. Forced to flee town, Jeremy drifts to Paris where after a month there and broke, he wanders into the Shakespeare and Company. There, the Utopian bookstore owner George Whitman allows the homeless to have a roof over his head, but allows no technology, not even a dial phone.

Mr. Mercer a deep kindhearted look at the owner and many of the long time residents. The subjects turn this less than a year in the life of Mr. Mercer into an intelligent amusing look into people, many eccentric and quite interesting, especially the Left Bank Utopian, a person readers will want to learn more about.

Harriet Klausner