Best of
France

1989

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution


Simon Schama - 1989
    A fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A NY Times cloth bestseller. 200 illustrations.

A Year in Provence


Peter Mayle - 1989
    He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.

Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930


Billy Kluver - 1989
    Presenting photographs of legendary figures, among them the model Kiki, Modigliani, Picasso, Satie, Matisse, Leger, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Miro. Gossip and anecdotes aim to bring this world alive.

Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education


Sybille Bedford - 1989
    It picks up where A Legacy leaves off, leading us from the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story of her apprenticeship to life, and of her many teachers: her father, a pleasure-loving German baron; her brilliant, beautiful, erratic English mother; and later, on the Mediterranean coast of France, the Huxleys, Aldous and Maria.

Year In/Toujours Provence Box


Peter Mayle - 1989
    Now, share their adventures, pleasures, and frustrations: the joys and occasional hazards of wining and dining in France, taking part in goat races, attending a Pavorotti concert under the stars -- and much more. Meet Provence's unique characters: a wary truffle hunter, a gourmet in a track suit, the wise and crafty Massot -- and many more. Funny, touching, endearing -- Peter Mayle's Provence proves the adage that while you may not be able to escape from it all, you sure can have fun trying.

Michel Foucault


Didier Eribon - 1989
    Hailed by distinguished historians and lionized on his frequent visits to America, he continues to provoke lively debate. The nature and merits of his accomplishments remain tangled in controversy. Rejecting traditional liberal and Marxist "dreams of solidarity", Foucault became the very model of the modern intellectual, replacing Sartre as the figure of the eminent Parisian and cosmopolitan master thinker.Foucault himself discouraged biographical questions, claiming that he was "not at all interesting". Didier Eribon's account contests that assertion. Well acquainted with Foucault before his death, Eribon has drawn from the eyewitness accounts of Foucault's closest friends and associates from all phases of his life - his mother, his schoolteachers, his classmates, his friends and enemies in academic life, and his celebrated companions in political activism, including Jean Genet, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand. Eribon has methodically retraced the footsteps of his peripatetic subject, from France to Sweden to Poland to Germany to Tunisia to Brazil to Japan to the United States. Who was this man, Michel Foucault?In the late 1950s Foucault emerged as a budding young cultural attache, friendly with Gaullist diplomats. By the mid-1960s he appeared as one of the avatars of structuralism, positioning himself as a new star in the fashionable world of French thought. A few months after the May 1968 student revolt, with Gaullism apparently shaken, he emerged as an ultra-leftist and a fellow traveler of Maoists. Yet during this same period, Eribon shows, he was quietly and adroitly campaigning for a chair in the College de France - the very pinnacle of the conservative French academic system.This book follows the career of one extraordinary intellectual and reconstructs the cultural, political and intellectual life of France from the postwar years to the present. It is the story of a man and his time.

The Rustle of Language


Roland Barthes - 1989
    --The Baroque side --What becomes of the signifier --Outcomes of the text --Reading Brillat-Savarin --An idea of research --Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure ... --Preface to Renaud Camus's Tricks --One always fails in speaking of what one loves --Writers, intellectuals, teachers --To the seminar --The indictment periodically lodged ... --Learning the movie theater --The image --Deliberation

Berlioz, Vol. 1: The Making of an Artist, 1803-1832


David Cairns - 1989
    After long being regarded as an oddity and an eccentric figure, Berlioz is now being accepted into the ranks of the great composers. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, and on a profound understanding of the humanity of his subject, David Cairns's book provides a full account of this extraordinary and powerfully attractive man.Berlioz, Volume I, previously published only in Britain, is now available to American readers in a revised edition, together with the eagerly awaited, new Volume II. These two volumes together comprise a monumental biographical achievement, sure to stand as the definitive Berlioz biography. In researching Berlioz's life, Cairns has had access to unpublished family papers, and in Volume I he is able to portray all the people close to Berlioz in his boyhood, and to evoke a detailed picture of their lives in and around La Côte St.-André in the foothills of the French Alps. No artist's achievement connects more directly with early experience than that of Berlioz, whose passionate sensibility began to absorb the material of his art long before he had heard any musical ensemble other than the local town band. Volume I also traces the student years in Paris and Italy and discusses Berlioz's three great love affairs, shedding remarkable light on his later character and development. Volume I ends on the afternoon of December 9, 1832, the day of the concert that launched the composer's career.

The Allure of the Archives


Arlette Farge - 1989
    While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. In The Allure of the Archives, she conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past. Originally published in 1989, Farge’s classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research while sharing astonishing details about life under the Old Regime in France. At once a practical guide to research methodology and an elegant literary reflection on the challenges of writing history, this uniquely rich volume demonstrates how surrendering to the archive’s allure can forever change how we understand the past.

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune


Kristin Ross - 1989
    Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France’s expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence of the Paris Commune - the construction of revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristen Ross has written a book that is at once history and geography of the Commune’s anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances.Central to her analysis of the Commune as social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross’s recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer Elisee Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of a capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipator notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud’s poetry. Applying contemporary theory to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.

France: The Beautiful Cookbook


Gilles Pudlowski - 1989
    Included in each large-format volume are gorgeous foodand landscape photographs.

The First Great Air War


Richard Townshend Bickers - 1989
     Just eleven years after the Wright brothers' first flight, the Royal Flying Corps set off for France, and every aspect of air-fighting had to be discovered for the first time. At the start of the First World War, the flying machine was hardly taken seriously; it was an odd, accident-prone diversion for the rich and the obsessed. Four years later when the war had ended, such had been the pace of development that almost the entire range of modern aircraft types had evolved: from fighters to bombers, from ground attack to reconnaissance. ‘The First Great Air War’ is the full, fascinating account of how a handful of men, British, French, German and Italian, young, with a love of flying and adventure, went to war. Of how tactics, planes and attitudes developed from the amateur to the professional. It is the story of air aces and individual courage, of technical innovation and the coming of age of air power. ‘A valuable history of the air war that began it all … by an ex-flyer of the Second World War who has a genuine feeling for the feats of his predecessors’ - THE BIRMINGHAM POST ‘His sympathy with the fighting man (and woman) shines out of every page’ - LIVERPOOL DAILY POST Richard Townsend Bickers volunteered for the RAF on the outbreak of the second world war and served, with a Permanent Commission, for eighteen years. He wrote a range of military fiction and non-fiction books, including ‘Torpedo Attack’, ‘My Enemy Came Nigh’, ‘Bombing Run’, ‘Fighters Up’ and ‘Summer of No Surrender’.

Michelin France Tourist & Motoring Atlas (Michelin France Tourist & Motoring Atlas (spiral))


Guides Touristiques Michelin - 1989
    Our precise mapping of main, secondary and tertiary roads is updated annually, so usuers have the most current information available. The grid-style format allows for highly detailed mapping on a manageable page size and an easy traveling experience.

Paintings in the Musee d'Orsay


Robert Rosenblum - 1989
    The author, an art historian, has selected and arranged the paintings, showing the breadth of the museum's collection.

Michelin Green Guide Provence


Guides Touristiques Michelin - 1989
    This guide includes descriptions of the region's hundreds of varied attractions, three summary maps highlighting the principal sights, more than 130 color photos, and 80 detailed maps.

The Danton Case and Thermidor: Two Plays


Stanisława Przybyszewska - 1989
    The Danton Case depicts the battle for power between two exceptional individuals: the corrupt sentimental idealist, Danton, and the incorruptible genius of the Revolution, Robespierre. Thermidor shows the final playing out of this drama, as Robespierre, left alone with the heroic absolutist Saint-Just, foresees the ruin of himself and his cause, and in his despair predicts that hatred, war, and capitalism will steal the Revolution and corrupt nineteenth-century man.

A Question of Loyalties


Allan Massie - 1989
    Etienne de Balafre, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father Lucien - was he a patriot who may have served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government? This subtle and moving novel, rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, explores the ties between fathers and sons and the pains of love and duty in a period in European history that is still characterised by wilful denial and hatred.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding: French Masterpieces, 1880-1940


Alastair Duncan - 1989
    The first major study of this fascinating period in French bookbinding. After giving a general overview, this study examines the work of over forty of the finest binders of the period. A brief description of each binder is given along with full color illustrations of their work. Detailed biographies and bibliographies are located at the end of the book. A nicely produced book which will provide inspiration to anyone who executes or appreciates fine hand bookbinding.

Walks in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler


Noël Riley Fitch - 1989
    Covering all the area of Paris that Hemingway and his fellow expatriates once roamed from Left Bank to Right, Noel Riley Fitch provides an intimate visit to major Parisian landmarks as well as to out-of-the-way cafes, hotels and residences immortalized by "Papa" and his friends.

Mollie and Other War Pieces


A.J. Liebling - 1989
    J. Liebling’s coverage of the Second World War for the New Yorker gives us a fresh and unexpected view of the war—stories told in the words of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought it, the civilians who endured it, and the correspondents who covered it. The hero of the title story is a private in the Ninth Army division known as Mollie, short for Molotov, so called by his fellow G.I.s because of his radical views and Russian origins. Mollie was famous for his outlandish dress (long blonde hair, riding boots, feathered beret, field glasses, and red cape), his disregard for army discipline, his knack for acquiring prized souvenirs, his tales of being a Broadway big shot, and his absolute fearlessness in battle. Killed in combat on Good Friday, 1943, Mollie (real name: Karl Warner) was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Intrigued by the legend and fascinated by the man behind it, Liebling searched out Mollie’s old New York haunts and associates and found behind the layers of myth a cocky former busboy from Hell’s Kitchen who loved the good life.Other stories take Liebling through air battles in Tunisia, across the channel with the D-Day invasion fleet, and through a liberated Paris celebrating de Gaulle and freedom. Liebling’s war was a vast human-interest story, told with a heart for the feelings of the people involved and the deepest respect for those who played their parts with heroism, however small or ordinary the stage.

The Vikings in Brittany


Neil Price - 1989
    

The Age of Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire, 1789—1815


Katell Le Bourhis - 1989
    

A Balthus Notebook


Guy Davenport - 1989
    Seven illustration Plates of Balthus' Paintings. 90 pages. 6 x 8.8 inches. The Echo Press, New York, 1989.

Art of Babar


Nicholas Fox Weber - 1989
    The author has worked with Laurent to reconstruct the genesis of Babar and his shy queen, Celeste, and to explore the themes that have made the Babar books so enduringly successful.

The Age of Chivalry: Myths and Legends


Claude-Catherine Ragache - 1989
    The stories people made up about their deeds helped to explain the mysteries of the real world – the rising and setting of the sun, the changing seasons, the dumb beasts.They fought with giants and dragons. They were loved by princesses, outwitted by witches and saved by their friends. They took on impossible tasks, accepted every challenge and unwittingly undertook any honourable mission. Their adventures took them to every corner of the known world.They were the bravest and most chivalrous men – Lancelot and the knights of the round table, who paid allegiance to King Arthur, and Roland and the knights at the court of Charlemagne. Their deeds are legendary, but there is little doubt that they are based on historical fact.

Panegyric: Books 1 & 2


Guy Debord - 1989
    But I have drunk far more than most drinkers. All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have joined in these troubles. My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident... Over the years, more than half the people I knew well had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of various countries; many, no doubt, for political reasons, but all the same a greater number for common law offenses or crimes. So I met mainly rebels or the poor. Our only manifestations, which remained rather rare and bried in the first years, were meant to be completely unacceptable; at first, especially by their form and, later, as they acquired depth, especially by their content. They were not accepted.” –Guy DebordGuy Debord, as founding and pivotal figure of the Situationist International, pursued one of the twentieth century’s most arch and exciting assaults on modern life. His 1967 Society of the Spectacle (followed, twenty years later, by Comments on the Society of the Spectacle) was a fierce critique of late-capitalist culture and became the signal text for those involved in the political events of May 1968 and beyond.Panegyric is Debord’s audacious autobiography, and here for the first time in English is the second, beautifully illustrated volume published together with the spare and classical text of the first. A rare combination of poetry and precision, it tells of something even rarer: a life that refused to adjust to the dominant malignancies of its time.

Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925


Kenneth E. Silver - 1989
    He radically reinterprets masterpieces of modern art, from Matisse and Picasso to Lger and Le Corbusier, demonstrating how their creators all refer, consciously or not, to the Great War and its aftermath. It's impossible to suppose that anybody will ever study the French art of this period without acknowledging dependence on Silver's huge book. In it a genuine historical crisis is studied by minute application to works of art and artistic controversies. It sets high standards.--Frank Kermode, The London Review of Books One of the outstanding books of the past decade and an indispensable addition to the history of twentieth-century art.--Holland Cotter, Art in America Ranks among the small number of works necessary to the understanding of art of this century.--Philippe Dagen, Le Monde

Stendhal: The Red and the Black


Stirling Haig - 1989
    In this introductory study, Stirling Haig shows how this realism derives from the incorporation of both history and legal reportage into the novel, and how it combines autobiography with mimesis. Professor Haig locates the novel in the context of Stendhal's own experiences as a Commissariat officer in the Napoleonic army, journalist, opera-lover, salon dandy and traveller in Italy and Restoration France, and highlights the constant inter-penetration of personal, documentary, and fictional elements in Stendhal's writings.

Pierre Deux's Brittany: Pierre Moulin,


Linda Dannenberg - 1989
    450 full-color photos.

An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial & the City of Lyon 1940-45


Ted Morgan - 1989
    Within the mountain of horrifying evidence, Barbie is only at the center. Morgan's narrative revolves around the entire wartime experience. Photographs and maps.r.

Street French 2: The Best of French Idioms


David Burke - 1989
    The book teaches the essentials of French idioms in 11 lessons. In addition to the lessons, it includes exercises and crossword puzzles. It also features a thesaurus of French idiomatic expressions and a glossary that contains English definitions of all the French words used in the book. Each lesson is broken down into five parts: dialogue; vocabulary; vocabulary practice; grammar; and exercises.

Literary Cafés of Paris


Noël Riley Fitch - 1989
    Learn about each city's culture, authors, bookstores, colleges, and literary meeting places. Take one along when you travel, or collect the entire series for an international armchair tour.

Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century


Rudolf E. Kuenzli - 1989
    These eleven illustrated essays explore the structure and meaning of Duchamp's work as part of an ongoing critical enterprise that has just begun. Ranging from the Munich period and the development of the ready-mades to the last work, Etant donn's, they present the latest thinking on Duchamp and his ideas.

French Folktales


Henri Pourrat - 1989
    Fairies, changelings, giants, demons, bumpkins, knaves, bewitched and bewitching princesses, bandits, and others enact stories of perilous tests of love, contests with the devil, the beneficence of saints, and more.Royall Tyler's translation deftly captures the vigor and resonance of the originals, and his cogent introduction illuminates for the reader the earthy, chilling, mischievous, and mystical realm these tales evoke.Contents:Fairy enchantmentsThe devilBanditsAround the villageThe mad and the wiseBestiaryLove and marriage

Marxism And The Great French Revolution


Paul McGarr - 1989