The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy


Charles Fourier - 1816
    He was also, as this volume demonstrates, a maniacal taxonomist. In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier's two "Hierarchies" --humorously regimented parades of civilization's cheaters and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. "The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry" --translated into English for the first time--presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such "common class" cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckolds, to the short-horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women's "secret insurrection" against the institution of marriage. "The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy" presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier's "Hierarchies" resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.

Congress-Mukt Bharat


Amit Bagaria - 2021
    For the first 92 years, the 135-year-old party was headed by a Nehru-Gandhi family member for only 11 years, even though Nehru and Indira were collectively the PM of India for 28 years. Then things changed. Indira was the party president for seven consecutive years, and succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi for six years. After Rajiv’s assassination in 1991, PV Narasimha Rao was party president for five years. Sitaram Kesri was the next Congress president for 18 months. Enter Sonia Gandhi. Barring a 20-month period when her son Rahul held the post, she has been Congress president for 23 years. During her ‘reign’, the party has seen an average 31.6% decline in vote share and a 50.2% reduction in seats in the Lok Sabha. Due to her not allowing a proper election for the post of party president — as was the norm for the first 92 years — the Congress is collapsing. Ever since the Modi-led NDA routed the party in 2014, several Congressmen have been complaining about “lack of effective leadership.” Narendra Modi. Whether you admire him or belittle him, adore him or chastise him, praise him or ridicule him, love him or hate him, no Indian can pretend to ignore the man. Since September 2013, he has been the biggest newsmaker in India . On 15th August 2020, Modi became the longest-serving non-Congress PM of India. The first three chapters of this easy-to-read book are about Congress party’s corruption. The next three analyse the 2019 elections in great detail. Then, there is a chapter about the Left Front and one on the Congress’ performance in each state since Sonia became the chief. The next eight chapters are about Modi, his successes, his failures, and the work he has done in 80 months. The longest chapter, divided into 14 sections, details the successes and failures of India’s 14 prime ministers. “Is Congress Becoming Anti-India” and “Congress-Mukt Bharat” are the final two chapters. The Appendix lays out ‘Agenda 2024’ for India.

Discourse on Colonialism


Aimé Césaire - 1950
    Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of "progress" and "civilization" upon encountering the "savage," "uncultured," or "primitive." He reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that "the relationship between consciousness and reality is extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." An interview with Aimé Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.

Learn French With Stories: 7 Short Stories For Beginner and Intermediate Students


Frederic Bibard - 2014
     It's a painless way to improve your French vocabulary and your confidence at reading and listening.(including Free MP3). No dictionary necessary-Each story is broken down with French and English Glossary. See example below; “Même si Laura est trop mauvaise cuisinière, et qu’elle est habituée à se nourrir uniquement de surgelés. Elle ne souhaite pas rater l’occasion de revoir toute sa famille. Elle réfléchit beaucoup mais ne trouve pas de solution. • est habitué = get used • se nourrir = feed • uniquement = only • surgelés = frozen food • rater l’occasion = miss the opportunity • réfléchit = think “ Never forget the vocabulary again: Vocabulary recap at the end of the book and each chapter. Practice your writing: Try to make your own summary. Compare it with an example for each chapter; Variety of situations: 7 stories about Travelling, Cooking, Shopping, Love, School, Relationship, Movie... Diverse Grammar structure and vocab: A good mix of dialogue and description. Improve your reading comprehension for newspaper articles, but also French spoken in the street. Practice your pronunciation and your listening with the free MP3!

Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents


Tom McDonough - 2002
    The first section of the issue contained previously unpublished critical texts, and the second section contained translations of primary texts that had previously been unavailable in English. The emphasis was on the SI's profound engagement with the art and cultural politics of their time (1957-1972), with a strong argument for their primarily political and activist stance by two former members of the group, T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith.Guy Debord and the Situationist International supplements both sections. It reprints important, hard to find essays by Giorgio Agamben, Libero Andreotti, Jonathan Crary, Thomas Y. Levin, Greil Marcus, and Tom McDonough and doubles the number of translations of primary texts, which now encompass a broader and more representative range of the SI's writings on culture and language. In a field still dominated by hagiography, the critical texts were selected for their willingness to confront critically the history and legacy of the SI. They examine the group within the broader framework of the historical and neo-avant-gardes and, beyond that, the postwar world in general. The translations trace the SI's reflections on the legacy of the avant-garde in art and architecture, particularly on the linguistic and spatial significance of montage aesthetics. Many of the translated works are by Guy Debord (1932-1994), the impresario of the SI, especially known for his book The Society of the Spectacle.

The French Revolution in a Nutshell


Neil Wenborn - 2009
    It brings vividly to life the implacable Robespierre, the frightened Marie Antoinette and the iconic image of the guillotine. But it also demonstrates the key role the Revolution played in the development of European politics.

Bakunin: The Creative Passion


Mark Leier - 2006
    Since then, the popular image of anarchism has been one of violence and terror. But this picture is wildly misleading, and the media has done more to obscure anarchism than to explain it. Focusing on the street fighting and confrontations with police, mainstream commentators are unable to understand what anarchism is or why a philosophy with roots in the nineteenth century has resurfaced with such power at the dawn of the new millennium. To understand anarchism, it is necessary to go beyond the caricature presented by the media. In this new biography of Mikhail Bakunin, Mark Leier traces the life and ideas of anarchism's first major thinker, and in the process revealing the origins of the movement.             There was little in Bakunin's background to suggest that he would grow up to be anything other than a loyal subject of the Russian Empire. Instead, he became one the most notorious radicals of the nineteenth century, devoting his life to the destruction of the tsar and feudalism, capitalism, the state, even God. In the process, he became a historical actor and political thinker whose ideas continue to influence world events.            Bakunin is of keen interest these days, though the attention paid to his image continues to obscure the man and his ideas. Using archival sources and the most recent scholarship, Leier corrects many of the popular misconceptions about Bakunin and his ideas, offering a fresh interpretation of Bakunin's life and thoughts of use to those interested in understanding anarchism and social change. Arguing for the relevance and importance of anarchism to our present world, Leier sheds light on the nineteenth century, as well as on today's headlines, as he examines a political philosophy that has inspired mass movements and contemporary social critics.              Mark Leier shows that the "passion for destruction" is a call to build a new world free of oppression, not a cult of violence. He argues that anarchism is a philosophy of morality and solidarity, based not on wishful thinking or naïve beliefs about the goodness of humanity but on a practical, radical critique of wealth and power. By studying Bakunin, we can learn a great deal about our own time and begin to recover a world of possibility and promise. It is often said that we are all anarchists at heart. This book explains why.

The Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction


John Phillips - 2005
    The style is lively and accessible without sacrificing detail or depth. An introductory chapter discusses Sade's life and the links between that and his work. Relying on the many letters he wrote to his wife and lawyer from prison and on other authentic, contemporary evidence, it attempts to disentangle this life from the various myths that Sade's demonic reputation has engendered throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This initial chapter also reviews the critical corpus or reception of the work since Sade's times up to the present, and reassesses his status as an extra-canonical writer. The following six chapters provide broad coverage of Sade's main intellectual and creative activities, showing how all can be seen as the expression of a veritable cult of the body, a veneration of the physical, and the sexual as channels of transcendence.

The Days of the French Revolution


Christopher Hibbert - 1980
    Napoleon. Louis XVI. Robespierre, Danton, Mirabeau, Marat. Madame Roland's salon. A passionate throng of Parisian artisans storming the Bastille. A tide of ebullient social change through wars, riots, beheadings, betrayal, conspiracy, and murder.CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT was born in Leicester in 1924 and educated at Radley and Oriel College, Oxford. Described by the New Statesman as "a pearl of biographers," he has established himself as a leading popular historian whose works reflect meticulous scholarship and has written more than twenty-five histories and biographies. Married with three children, he lives in Oxfordshire.

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis


Alice Kaplan - 2012
    . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision—and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn’t have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program—in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book  editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration—to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem “too French.” Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence—to be grappled with, explored, and transcended—the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year—and a magical city—can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.

The French Foreign Legion


Douglas Boyd - 2006
     Founded in 1831 to fight France’s colonial wars without spilling French blood, this mysterious army is today a world-class fighting force. Training is so tough that five recruits out of six are rejected, never to wear the coveted white kepi. This is a world where fact exceeds the wildest fiction: men fighting literally to the last bullet at Camarón in Mexico in 1863; cooks and clerks with no parachute training volunteering to be dropped into beleaguered Dien Bien Phu in 1954 with the intention of dying beside their comrades; the paras who mutinied in Algeria to bring down the government of France; the heroes who dropped on Kolwezi to rescue thousands of European hostages. Praise for Douglas Boyd 'A tight and fascinating history of the nearly two centuries of the Legion's activities.' - Brig Anthony Hunter-Choat, the UK's senior ex-legionnaire Perhaps the greatest praise of the book is the fact that legionnaires liked this history of their incredible army so much that they elected author Douglas Boyd an honorary ex-legionnaire. RAF Russian linguist, international businessman, music impresario, BBC Television Producer/Director, Douglas Boyd has been writing full-time since setting up home in a medieval farmhouse in south-west France thirty-five years ago. His published fiction and non-fiction, translated into many languages, includes three novels set against a Legion background: The Eagle and the Snake, The Truth and the Lies, The Honour and the Glory.

NOT A BOOK: What the (Bleep) Just Happened?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback


NOT A BOOK - 2012
    In this funny, fast-paced, razor-sharp, well-reasoned, and supremely savvy critique of the state of our union under the disastrous reign of Barack Obama, bestselling author, Fox News contributor, syndicated columnist, and popular radio host Monica Crowley asks (and answers) the pressing question: What the @$%& has happened to America? “The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback,” What the (Bleep) Just Happened? doesn’t simply bemoan the trashing of the American economy and the intentional firebombing of America’s international prestige, it offers inspiration and a positive message to conservatives and concerned Americans everywhere that the way to fight back and win is with principle, conviction…and a wicked sense of humor.

Anarchy: A Graphic Guide


Clifford Harper - 1987
     Anarchy, A Graphic Guide is an account of people's attempts to build a world and live a life free of imposed authority. From the thirteenth century Free Spirits, to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, from Noam Chomsky to the Zapatistas, Clifford Harper chronicles, in word and illustration, ordinary people's extraordinary efforts to overcome authoritarian social and economic conditions.Harper's beautifully rendered drawings add a distinctive elegance to his writings. With entirely new illustrations-over 350-and prose, this handsome reissue can hardly be called a reprint. His celebrated style brings new life to history's forgotten and maligned heroes: the Diggers, William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, the Grimke Sisters, Francisco Ferrer, Buenaventura Durruti, the Kronstadt sailors, Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Goodman, and Carol Ehrlich. In addition, he addresses anarchism's relationship to broader movements, including art, feminism, environmentalism, abolitionism, labor, intellectualism, atheism, and education.

The Dreyfus Affair: The Scandal That Tore France in Two


Piers Paul Read - 2012
    The German military attaché in Paris receives a visit from a seedy-looking man who claims to be a French army officer in desperate need of money, offering to sell them military secrets.Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a rising star in the French artillery command. Reserved yet intelligent and ambitious, Dreyfus had everything: a family, money, and a clear path to a prestigious post on the General Staff. However, Dreyfus had enemies as a result of his ambition. Many of them came from the impoverished Catholic aristocracy and disliked Dreyfus because he was rich, bourgeois, and, above all, a Jew.On the basis of flimsy evidence, Dreyfus was placed under arrest for the crime of high treason. Not long afterward, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life on the legendary, lethal Devil's Island. The saga of Dreyfus's many trials-he was not exonerated until 1906, twelve years after first being arrested-the fight to free him, and the intrigues on both sides, is a fast-moving mystery story rife with heroes and villains, loose women, loyal wives, bisexual men, tricksters, and charlatans. But this was no mere sideshow. The anti-Semitism and deceit on display in the Dreyfus case was an ominous prelude to the Holocaust and the long, bloody twentieth century to come.In an era when religious conflict, fierce patriotism, and charged debates over national identity pervade the public sphere, the scandal of Captain Dreyfus still has much to teach us. In the hands of prizewinning novelist, biographer, and narrative historian Piers Paul Read, this real-life morality tale comes alive for a new generation. Using his storytelling skills and a nuanced, deep knowledge of French history, Read rediscovers l'affaire Dreyfus as a rich, riveting tale.

The French Revolution: A History


Thomas Carlyle - 1837
    It combines a shrewd insight into character, a vivid realization of the picturesque, and a singular ability to bring the past to blazing life, making it a reading experience as thrilling as any novel. As John D. Rosenberg observes in his Introduction, The French Revolution is “one of the grand poems of [Carlyle’s] century, yet its poetry consists in being everywhere scrupulously rooted in historical fact.”This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition, complete and unabridged, is unavailable anywhere else.