My favorite Paris guidebook is not from Lonely Planet, Wallpaper or Monocle. In fact, I’m sure you have never heard of it. Titled “Paris Here I Come!” and published by the Afro-American Company in 1953, it is a slim volume, a mere 30 pages set inside a cheerful yellow cover emblazoned with a white line drawing of the Eiffel Tower.

Full of charming, conversational advice, the booklet describes Paris as “not a place, but a way of living — unique, lusty and uninhibited.”

The book’s author, Ollie Stewart, was my father’s uncle, born in Louisiana in 1906. He was the first Black reporter accredited as a war correspondent during World War II, and after the war, he lived in Paris until his death in 1977.

In the e-book “Race Goes to War,” Antero Pietila and Stacy Spaulding describe Uncle Ollie’s wartime travels for The Afro-American, a Black newspaper based in Baltimore. He covered skirmishes in North Africa in 1942, the battle for Sicily in 1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.