Well, I was going to write a book called “The Mindset of Networking™” as part of my “day job”. I run a company called Southeast Business Forums, LLC. It is a business-to-business, senior level networking organization. I wanted to have a short book that I could autograph and hand to my new members. The other motivating factor was to gain credibility because we all know that you’re looked at differently when someone finds out you are a published author.
I kind of procrastinated in writing this book (don’t most “would be” authors?). So in the meantime, I found this book by Leonard Pitt. It’s called “Walks Through Lost Paris…A Journey into the Heart of Historic Paris”. I bought it through Amazon.com because it caught my attention as a book on historical Paris. The book exceeded my expectations in ways you can’t imagine. If you are like me, you must buy this book.
What Mr. Pitt has done is written a walking guide through portions of Paris with historical photographs of streets and buildings as they were prior to the Baron Haussmann’s “reconstruction and reconfiguration” of Paris in the mid-19th century. He compares these to contemporary photos. Along the way, he shows you street map overlays of the streets then and the streets now. For someone like me, walking through Paris with this book was absolutely fascinating.
Anyway, once I read this book (over and over), I got to thinking why can’t a book be written like this but on a specific subject. Well, the French Revolution is something that I’ve studied on my own over the years. As I noodled this around in my head, I came up with a concept that would allow me to take a visitor to actual buildings, places (where buildings used to stand), sites (where major events occurred) and people (where they lived and/or are buried) that were significant to the French Revolution.
As I started to do some preliminary research, I found that there were no books like this. I couldn’t find any in-depth walking tours specifically on the French Revolution (the ones out there took you to five, maybe six sites that you would normally see on any group bus tour). There are hundreds of books on the French Revolution, primarily from a scholarly or intellectual approach. The information I needed was in these books and on the Internet. It was just a matter of finding it and pulling it all together.
If I haven’t already told you, I appreciate you following my blog and my journey.
-Stew
Please note that I do not and will not take compensation from individuals or companies I mention or promote in my blog.
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Copyright © 2012 Stew Ross
