Best of
France

1998

The Unknown Matisse, 1869-1908


Hilary Spurling - 1998
    Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite. But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now.It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.From the Hardcover edition.

Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story


Amanda Vaill - 1998
    In Everybody Was So Young--one of the best reviewed books of 1998--Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who flocked around them. Whether summering with Picasso on the French Riviera or watching bullfights with Hemingway in Pamplona, Gerald and Sara inspired kindred creative spirits like Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night were modeled after the Murphys). Their story is both glittering and tragic, and in this sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait of a marriage and an era, Amanda Vaill "has brought them to life as never before" (Chicago Tribune).

The Address Book


Sophie Calle - 1998
    Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it to its anonymous owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals--in essence, following him through the map of his acquaintances. Originally published as a serial in the newspaper "Liberation" over the course of one month, her incisive written accounts with friends, family and colleagues, juxtaposed with photographs, yield vivid subjective impressions of the address book's owner, Pierre D., while also suggesting ever more complicated stories as information is parsed and withheld by the people she encounters. Collaged through a multitude of details--from the banal to the luminous, this fragile and strangely intimate portrait of Pierre D. is a prism through which to see the desire for, and the elusivity of, knowledge. Upon learning of this work and its publication in the newspaper, Pierre D. expressed his anger, and Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Until then, "The Address Book" had only been described in English--as the work of the character Maria Turner, whom Paul Auster based on Calle in his novel "Leviathan"; and in "Double Game," Calle's monograph which converses with Auster's novel. This is the first trade publication in English of "The Address Book" (Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles released a suite of lithographs modeled on the original tabloid pages from "Liberation" in an edition of 24). The book has the physical weight and feel of an actual address book with a new design of text and images which allow the story to unfold and be savored by the reader.

Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the Birth of Modern Art


Dan Franck - 1998
    In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a vivid and magical tour of the Paris of 1900-1930, a hotbed of artistic creation where we encounter the likes of Apollinaire, Modigliani, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, working, loving, and struggling to stay afloat. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations are also featured.

The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century


Tony Judt - 1998
    Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption.Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries."An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times

The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France


Asti HustvedtJean Moréas - 1998
    The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-siecle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendes, Rachilde, Jean Moreas, Octave Mirbeau, Josephin Peladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-siecle France.

Paris


Eugène Atget - 1998
    After trying his hand at painting and acting, the native of Libourne turned to photography and moved to Paris. He supplied studies for painters, architects, and stage designers, but became enraptured by what he called documents of the city and its environs. His scenes rarely included people, but rather the architecture, landscape, and artifacts that made up the societal and cultural stage. Atget was not particularly renowned during his lifetime but in the 1920s came to the attention of the Dada and Surrealist avant-garde through Man Ray. Four of his images, with their particular fusion of mimesis and mystery, appeared in the surrealist journal, La Revolution Surrealiste, while Ray and much of his artistic circle purchased Atget prints. His fame grew after his death, with several articles and a monograph by Berenice Abbott. Several leading photographers, including Walker Evans and Bill Brandt, have since acknowledged their debt to Atget. This fresh TASCHEN edition gathers some 500 photographs from the Atget archives to celebrate his oustanding eye for the urban environment and evocation of a Paris gone by. Down main streets and side streets, past shops and churches, through courtyards and arcades and the 20 arrondissements, we find a unique portrait of a beloved city and the making of a modern photographic master. About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!Text in English, French, and German"

The Provence trilogy


Peter Mayle - 1998
    

Veils


Hélène Cixous - 1998
    "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

My Heart Through Which Her Heart Has Passed


André Breton - 1998
    Sometimes sharply autobiographical, sometimes dizzyingly oblique, these poems trace Bretons tumultuous love affair with Suzanne Muzard, the woman who changed the course of his life in the early years of Surrealism. The volume includes an introduction by translator and Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti, discussing the poems' background and history. Printed in a limited edition of 300 copies, with three period photographs of Breton and Muzard. The first one hundred copies are signed by the translator.

Mrs. Kennedy Goes Abroad


Jacqueline Duhême - 1998
    They bring back the magic, grace, and elegance of the famous travels abroad made by the µuncrowned queen of the world.'" --Letitia Baldrige Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis--American icon, archetype of style and grace, symbol of strength and beauty--captivated audiences, grand and common, around the world for decades. Her majestic elegance is captured in a special gift book, Mrs. Kennedy Goes Abroad, by French painter, illustrator, and friend of the First Lady, Jacqueline DuhOme.When President and Mrs. Kennedy traveled to Paris in 1961, Mlle DuhOme painted scenes from their historic trip. She continued to paint as she accompanied the First Lady and her sister on a later tour of India, Pakistan, Rome, and London.Now these whimsical and imaginative paintings make their first appearance together in this charming volume, along with line drawings, anecdotal recollections, and historic photographs from Mlle DuhOme's collection.

A Test of Solitude


Emmanuel Hocquard - 1998
    Translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop. "Emmulating Wittgenstein, who repaired to an isolated cabin in Norway to write and reflect, Hocquard takes up his own test of solitude on a farm not far from Bordeaux. What he writes there are unconventional sonnets that arrive at their stipulated line-count by an ingenious variety of means. They record with deceptive simplicity daily accounts and experiences. At the same time, an inquiry is being conducted, a test of solitude that is also a test of poetry"--Steve Evans.

Baudelaire in English


Charles Baudelaire - 1998
    Writers from Lord Alfred Douglas to Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Aldous Huxley to Seamus Heaney, from Arthur Symons to John Ashbery, from Basil Bunting to Robert Lowell, have all attempted to transmit in English his psychological and sexual complexity, his images of urban alienation. This superb addition to the Poets in Translation series brings together the translations of his poetry and prose poems that best reveal the different facets of Baudelaire's personality: the haughtily defiant artist, the tormented bohemian, the savage yet tender lover, and the celebrant of strange and haunted cityscapes.

Bonnard


Sarah Whitfield - 1998
    In this book, Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield bring a new understanding to his deeply serious, complex paintings. Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, and at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bonnard features two important essays based on much fresh research. Sarah Whitfield, curator of the exhibition, discusses the legacy of the symbolism of Bonnard's early years and the way in which his acceptance of nature's surrender to time finds expression in the grand elegiac paintings of the later period. John Elderfield, curator of the exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, writes about Bonnard's awareness of the complexities of visual perception, and how crucial an understanding of this is to fully comprehending his stature as a painter.

Monsieur Pamplemousse Omnibus, Volume 1


Michael Bond - 1998
    For the new reader it provides a good introduction to the world of Michael Bond's culinary mysteries and his delightful central character Monsieur Pamplemousse (and, of course, Pommes Frites)."

The Passionate Observer


Jean-Henri Fabre - 1998
    An instant hit when it was published in France in 1879, Souvenirs Entomologiques has endured as a testament to our universal fascination with the smallest of creatures. McLoughlin's exquisite original paintings were created especially to illuminate this collection of clever, amusing, and provocative writings. Whether depicting the intricate texture of a butterfly's wings or the pale delicacy of a hummingbird's egg, Jean Henri Fabre and Marlene McLoughlin create a vivid world of discovery.

Post Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven


Antoine Volodine - 1998
    But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple of journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement. This is without a doubt one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of words

Chateaux of the Loire


Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos - 1998
    In this book, the photographer Robert Polidori has captured more than seventy of them in unique pictures. He depicts the Chateau of Blois in its imposing beauty, the original fortifications in Chinon and Angers, and the Magnificent Azay-le-Rideau. It goes without saying that the splendid Chambord is here as well, a place redolent of legend and history like almost no other.

The Ark of Speech


Jean-Louis Chrétien - 1998
    "The Ark of Speech" investigates the interplay of speech and silence in the dialogue between God and human beings, one human being and another, and human beings and the world.

Yves Saint Laurent and Fashion Photography


Yves Saint-Laurent - 1998
    A 231 page hardcover book with lots of amazing photos of Yves Saint Laurent designs as well as an essay by Marguerite Duras.

The King's Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray


Nina Rattner Gelbart - 1998
    In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.Who was the woman, both the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by, to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of Terror. At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender, society, politics, and culture.

The Most Beautiful Villages of Burgundy


James Bentley - 1998
    Many of these ancient communities stand beside the leisurely rivers that wend their way through the duchy - the beginnings of the Seine, the Yonne, the tributaries of the Loire and the Saone. And beside these rivers lie woodlands, pastures and the greatest vineyards in the world. Complete with a map and traveler's guide, "The Most Beautiful Villages of Burgandy" is the definitive introduction to one of the most enchanting regions in the western world.

Paris : buildings and monuments : an illustrated guide with over 850 drawings and neighborhood maps


Michel Poisson - 1998
    And, no parked cars, pedestrian traffic, or billboards block Poisson's views.The book is organized by neighborhood and includes easy-to-follow maps for walking tours. Each drawing is accompanied by informative text. All the major monuments are covered, along with many fascinating but less well-known structures that only a lifelong Parisian like Poisson would know.

Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography


Christophe Bident - 1998
    His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May '68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the '30s.Now translated into English, Christophe Bident's magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer's close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident's book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.The book is also a historical work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident's extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot's work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot's life itself becomes an oeuvre--becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident's sophisticated reading of Blanchot's life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot's detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.

The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution


Dominique Godineau - 1998
    Here, for the first time in English translation, Dominique Godineau offers an illuminating account of these female revolutionaries. As nurturing and tender as they are belligerent and contentious, these are not singular female heroines but the collective common women who struggled for bare subsistence by working in factories, in shops, on the streets, and on the home front while still finding time to participate in national assemblies, activist gatherings, and public demonstrations in their fight for the recognition of women as citizens within a burgeoning democracy. Relying on exhaustive research in historical archives, police accounts, and demographic resources at specific moments of the Revolutionary period, Godineau describes the private and public lives of these women within their precise political, social, historical, and gender-specific contexts. Her insightful and engaging observations shed new light on the importance of women as instigators, activists, militants, and decisive revolutionary individuals in the crafting and rechartering of their political and social roles as female citizens within the New Republic.

Interpreting Bonnard: Color and Light


Nicholas Watkins - 1998
    This book provides a concise review of Bonnard's life, key works, and the development of his technique. 50 color illustrations.

Dordogne Berry Limousin


Guides Touristiques Michelin - 1998
    With its fine food and exceptional prehistoric sites; Berry and Limousin, a heartland rich in rural traditions.

Leonardo Da Vinci


Daniel Arasse - 1998
    In this book, he demonstrates how Leonardo's beliefs; how his Promethean curiosity and his acute visual sensitivity guided his explorations in art and nature.

Mary Cassatt: A Life


Nancy Mowll Mathews - 1998
    This book provides new insight into the personal life and artistic endeavors of this extraordinary woman.

Max Beckmann and Paris: Matisse Picasso Braque Leger Rouault (Jumbo Series)


Max Beckmann - 1998
    Yet, for more than 15 years Paris was the focus of Beckmann's life and career. Already renowned artist in Germany, Beckmann set out to match his ambitions against the greatest artistic masters of the time. This book presents for the first time the details of Beckmann's life in Paris. Original materials such as his wife's personal scrapbook previously unpublished letters and recently discovered filmstrips shed new light on this important period.

Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England


Margaret Howell - 1998
    It provides an unusually intimate and coherent picture of a woman who combined a remarkable aptitude for politics with a strong family commitment and warm friendships.

Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism


Adolf Max Vogt - 1998
    This study of Le Corbusier's oeuvre looks at the early, formative years of the architect's life as a key to understanding his mature practice, and to solving such fundamental questions as where did his design vocabulary come from?, and how was his aesthetic sense formed?.

The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I: The Complete Text


Alexis de Tocqueville - 1998
    One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Françoise Mélonio and the late François Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.

Duchamp: Love and Death, even


Juan Ramirez - 1998
    But although his influence is comparable only to Picasso's, Duchamp continues to be relatively unknown outside his narrow circle of followers. This book seeks to explain his oeuvre, which has been shrouded with mystery.Duchamp's two great preoccupations were the nature of scientific truth and a feeling for love with its natural limit, death. His works all speak of eroticism in a way that pushes the socially acceptable to its outer limits. Juan Antonio Ramirez addresses such questions as the meaning of the artist's ground-breaking ready-mades and his famous installation Etant donnés; his passionate essay reproduces all of Duchamp's important works, in addition to numerous previously unpublished visual sources. Duchamp: Love and Death, even is a seminal monograph for understanding this crucial figure of modern art.

Day of Destiny: The Photographs of D-Day


L. Douglas Keeney - 1998
    Day of Destiny includes more than one hundred rare photographs never before assembled to provide a visual narrative of one of the century's most pivotal events.

The French Consul's Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-Rush Australia


Patricia Clancy - 1998
    Her vivid account of years spent in diplomatic circles and on the goldfields reveals her great energy and will.

Serge Lutens


Serge Lutens - 1998
    Photographer make up artist, intoner and set designer creator of perfumes, and fashion designer, Serge lutens is one of the most important figures in the fashion world

Rene Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide


Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt - 1998
    As an individual, Daumal was seen by those who knew him as a modern proto-saint with a blazing intellect and wit; as a writer, he was the first to forge a mystical link between classical Hindu poetics and the revolutionary views of Gurdjieff, synthesized in surrealist style.Originally published in French, this revised English edition shows why many feel that Daumal's literary group, Le Grand Jeu was a brief, but more authentic voice of the French avant-garde circa 1930 than the more established Surrealist movement. While still in his teens, he placed himself at the crossroads of powerful converging influences: Hinduism, Surrealism, Marxism, Freudianism, and parapsychology, but the strongest influence was the fiery internal cauldron of his own lifelong spiritual struggle. At sixteen, Daumal began to teach himself Sanskrit and to decipher the essence of Hindu philosophy and poetics, but it was the teaching of Gurdjieff that truly changed his life, giving him an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the human being and of the entire cosmos.Rosenblatt traces all these influences and experiences as they reveal the depths of Daumal's being, and as they surface in his poetry, Le Contre-ciel, and in his two short novels, A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue. Today, Daumal's personal vision of the Infinite and the story of his quest are more timely and essential than ever.

Who Was Who In The Napoleonic Wars


Philip J. Haythornthwaite - 1998
    Now a comprehensive biographical dictionary profiles more than 500 of the most important figures in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and other conflicts of the period. Besides covering hundreds of the most prominent military leaders, entries feature political leaders, scientists, and engineers who developed new weapons and other relevant inventions, and even composers of the most popular marching songs. 320 pages, 250 b/w illus., 7 1/2 x 9 3/4.

Bonnard Colour & Light


Nicholas Watkins - 1998
    It reviews his life and work, and sets out to show, through an analysis of key works, how his technique and working methods developed over 50 years. During his long career, Bonnard's subject matter remained focused on his wife, his homes and his self-portraits, but his approach to these subjects changed radically. At first he worked chiefly in tone, but gradually colour enriched his work, and finally light suffused it. The author argues that Bonnard was not a sentimental survivor of Impressionism, as he was often labelled, but a highly demanding formal artist who transformed light into an emotional atmosphere enveloping the surface within which objects exist.

Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism


Julia A. Clancy-Smith - 1998
    This collection goes beyond the crude dichotomies of "European" and "indigenous" or "non-European" to examine the meanings of cross-cultural and interracial interactions in local historical contexts. The contributors' analyses are firmly rooted in historical figures and events and employ a wde range of primary sources to examine shifting images of femininity and masculinity, motherhood and fatherhood.