You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 2002, a neo-fascist party nearly seized control of the French government in an electoral shocker. The Mistral was conceived to expose the roots of that movement, which still exists today. Noel Marquis, a beautiful young woman, is aided by Jean Francois, a former boyfriend; Father Routhier, a Catholic priest in the historic tradition of Cardinal Richelieu; and Lieutenant Flanagan, a retired detective in tracing her father's mysterious life through three decades and across two continents. But Noel becomes the target of a fascist killer when she unearths the conspiracy to murder her uncle and the attempted assassination of her father, Marius Marquis. With Noel's support, Marius can finally understand a thirty-year-old plot-the by-product of a political malignancy that caused his wife's death-and start on a journey that will transform his life. From Algeria, the south of France, the United States, and Canada, The Mistral is a thrilling story of mystery, love, and international political conspiracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates o...
Célestin Freinet (1896-1966) spent his whole life teaching in small rural elementary schools in the south of France. From this base, he pioneered an international movement for radical educational reform through cooperative learning. Freinet's Modern School Movement has provided the network through which a broad community of teachers have come to know his remarkable variety of innovative classroom approaches: the importance of creative and useful work for children learning and close observation of how they do it; a direct appreciation for the natural world; a commitment to developing appropriate technologies for the classroom; and a strong emphasis on linking school and community with the wider issues of social justice and action. Cooperative Learning and Social Change offers an introduction to a powerful pedagogical method that remains fresh and relevant today. An Our Schools/Our Selves book.
"This contemporary oral history, based on interviews and recorded observations made over an eighteen-year period, tells the compelling story of the small Jewish community of Dijon, France, and how it has evolved over time in response to both internal andexternal challenges.
What happens when the meaning of life based on a divine revelation no longer makes sense? Does the quest for transcendence end in the pursuit of material success and self-absorption? Luc Ferry argues that modernity and the emergence of secular humanism in Europe since the eighteenth century have not killed the search for meaning and the sacred, or even the idea of God, but rather have transformed both through a dual process: the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human. Ferry sees evidence for the first of these in the Catholic Church's attempts to counter the growing rejection of dogmatism and to translate the religious tradition into contemporary language. The second he traces to the birth of modern love and humanitarianism, both of which demand a concern for others and even self-sacrifice in defense of values that transcend life itself. Ferry concludes with a powerful statement in favor of what he calls "transcendental humanism"—a concept that for the first time in human history gives us access to a genuine spirituality rooted in human beings instead of the divine.
Embraces an all-encompassing interdisciplinary methodology to uncover the symbiosis of saintly and civic ideals in music, rituals, and hagiographic writing celebrating the origins and identity of a major clerical center. Medieval Liège was the seat of a vast diocese in northwestern Europe and a city of an exceptional number of churches, clergymen, and church musicians. Recognized as a priestly paradise, the city accommodated as many Masses each day as Rome. In this volume, musicologist Catherine Saucier examines the music of religious worship in Liège and reveals within the liturgy and ritual a civic function by which local clerics promoted the holy status of their city. Analyzing hagiogra...
How do we explain what Perry Anderson calls "the bizarre prominence of Bernard-Henri Lvy," easily the best-known "thinker" under sixty in France? "It would," he continues, "be difficult to imagine a more extraordinary reversal of national standards of taste and intelligence than the attention accorded this crass booby in France's public sphere, despite innumerable demonstrations of his inability to get a fact or an idea straight. Could such a grotesque flourish in any other major Western culture today?" This book, based on a careful investigation comparing BHL's words with his deeds, seeks to explore the remarkable persistence of this celebrity pseudo-philosopher since he burst onto the scen...
This volume presents the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature, film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War. Basedin five different countries, Margaret Atack, Marc Dambre, Laurent Douzou, Hilary Footitt, Robert Gildea, Richard J. Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Nettelbeck, Denis Peschanski, Renée Poznanski, Henry Rousso, Peter Tame, and Susan Rubin Suleiman have playeda crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research. This volume, which also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton, clarifies the rationales and driving forces behind their work and thus behind our current understanding of one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France.
Why do some countries remain poor and dysfunctional while others thrive and become affluent? The expert contributors to this volume seek to identify reasons why prosperity has increased rapidly in some countries but not others by constructing and comparing cases. The case studies focus on the processes of nation building, state building, and economic development in comparably situated countries over the past hundred years. Part I considers the colonial legacy of India, Algeria, the Philippines, and Manchuria. In Part II, the analysis shifts to the anticolonial development strategies of Soviet Russia, Ataturk's Turkey, Mao's China, and Nasser's Egypt. Part III is devoted to paired cases, in w...