"City of Light, City of Shadows" by Mike Rapport takes us to the era of the Belle Époque, a golden age of cultural flourishing and political progress, between the revolutionary decade of the 1870s and the declaration of war in 1914. The modern French capital was shaped with impressive monuments like the Eiffel Tower and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur. But behind the elegant facade, Paris was at war with itself, as the Belle Époque was also a time of social and religious turmoil, as well as struggles for women's liberation. Developments such as the first car on the streets and the first Metro railways combined with intense concerns and trends, as reactionary forces were revealed through new media, like the Dreyfus Affair, highlighting the dark side of French anti-Semitism. The narrative is permeated by the voices of great figures of the time, such as Émile Zola, Marguerite Durand, Nguyễn Trọng Hợp, and Jean Jaurès, offering an extraordinary mosaic of stories of grandeur and pain, joy and anguish in the city of light.