Author: Carol Wyer
Publisher: Canelo
ISBN: 1788632761
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
USA Today–bestselling Author: “A refreshingly different romcom that’s sweet, funny and moving in all the right amounts.” —Victoria Cooke, author of The Holiday Cruise Bryony Masters has been looking for her long-lost sister, Hannah, for years. So when primetime game show What Happens in France calls for new contestants, she spots the ultimate public platform to track down the reality TV-obsessed Hannah, and finally reunite their family. Accompanied by handsome teammate Lewis, Bryony soon finds herself on a private jet heading for the stunning beauty of rural France. But with a social media star dog, a high maintenance quiz host, and a cast of truly unique characters, Bryony and Lewis have their work cut out for them to stay on the show and in the public eye . . . “A hilarious and touching tale.” —Sue Watson, USA Today–bestselling author of Love, Lies and Lemon Cake “Laughs aplenty and a heartwarming read.” —Mandy Baggot, author of Under a Greek Sun “Fantastique and frivolously funny—but for goodness sake, read with a box of tissues. . . ! A sensational story that will sweep you up in spontaneity, sympathy, and endless smiles.” —Isabella May, author of Spin the Bottle “A hugely funny romantic comedy with lots of heartwarming, endearing moments.” —Stardust Book Review
Author: Brian A. McKenzie
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455613
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Public diplomacy, neglected following the end of the Cold War, is once again a central tool of American foreign policy. This book, examining as it does the Marshall Plan as the form of public diplomacy of the United States in France after World War Two, offers a timely historical case study. Current debates about globalization and a possible revival of the Marshall Plan resemble the debates about Americanization that occurred in France over fifty years ago. Relations between France and the United States are often tense despite their shared history and cultural ties, reflecting the general fear and disgust and attraction of America and Americanization. The period covered in this book offers a good example: the French Government begrudgingly accepted American hegemony even though anti-Americanism was widespread among the French population, which American public diplomacy tried to overcome with various cultural and economic activities examined by the author. In many cases French society proved resistant to Americanization, and it is questionable whether public diplomacy actually accomplished what its advocates had promised. Nevertheless, by the 1950s the United States had established a strong cultural presence in France that included Hollywood, Reader's Digest, and American-style hotels.
Author: Mona Chollet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027222X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
Mona Chollet's In Defense of Witches is a “brilliant, well-documented” celebration (Le Monde) by an acclaimed French feminist of the witch as a symbol of female rebellion and independence in the face of misogyny and persecution. Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed? Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores three types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, since widows and celibates were particularly targeted; the childless woman, since the time of the hunts marked the end of tolerance for those who claimed to control their fertility; and the elderly woman, who has always been an object of at best, pity, and at worst, horror. Examining modern society, Chollet concludes that these women continue to be harrassed and oppressed. Rather than being a brief moment in history, the persecution of witches is an example of society’s seemingly eternal misogyny, while women today are direct descendants to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who live their lives on their own terms.
Author: Michael P. Fitzsimmons
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271046171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Author: Mike Rapport
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191642517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The Napoleonic Wars have an important place in the history of Europe, leaving their mark on European and world societies in a variety of ways. In many European countries they provided the stimulus for radical social and political change - particularly in Spain, Germany, and Italy - and are frequently viewed in these places as the starting point of their modern histories. In this Very Short Introduction, Mike Rapport provides a brief outline of the wars, introducing the tactics, strategies, and weaponry of the time. Presented in three parts, he considers the origins and course of the wars, the ways and means in which it was fought, and the social and political legacy it has left to the world today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: Hervé Le Tellier
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635421764
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller and a "Best Thriller of the Year" Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight. Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out. In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer. Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay. Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client. Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame. About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.
Author: Hanna Diamond
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191622990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Wednesday 12th June 1940. The Times reported 'thousands upon thousands of Parisians leaving the capital by every possible means, preferring to abandon home and property rather than risk even temporary Nazi domination'. As Hitler's victorious armies approached Paris, the French government abandoned the city and its people, leaving behind them an atmosphere of panic. Roads heading south filled with ordinary people fleeing for their lives with whatever personal possessions they could carry, often with no particular destination in mind. During the long, hard journey, this mass exodus of predominantly women, children, and the elderly, would face constant bombings, machine gun attacks, and even starvation. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Hanna Diamond shows how the disruption this exodus brought to the lives of civilians and soldiers alike made it a defining experience of the war for the French people. As traumatized populations returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Pétain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation. Watching events unfold on the other side of the channel, British ministers looked on with increasing horror, terrified that Britain could be next.
Author: Philip Short
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099597896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 706
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Book Description
A definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's most glamorous, complicated political figures. Aesthete, sensualist, bookworm, politician of Machiavellian cunning: FranCois Mitterrand was a man of exceptional gifts and exceptional flaws who, during his fourteen years as President, strove to drag his tradition-bound and change-averse country into the modern world. As a statesman and as a human being, he was the incarnation of the mercurial, contrarian France which Britain and America find so perennially frustrating. He embodied the ambiguities and the contradictions of a nation whose modern identity is founded on a stubborn refusal to fit into the Anglo-American scheme of things. Yet he changed France more profoundly than any of his recent predecessors, arguably including even his great rival, Charles de Gaulle. During the war he was both the leader of a resistance movement and decorated for services to the collaborationist regime in Vichy. After flirting with the far Right, he entered parliament with the backing of conservatives and the Catholic Church before becoming the undisputed leader of the Left. As President he brought the French Communists into the government the better to destroy them. And all the while he managed to find time for an extraordinarily complicated private life. This is a human as much as a political biography, and a captivating portrait of a life that mirrored Mitterrand's times.
Author: Andrew Hussey
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847085946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
Beyond the affluent centre of Paris and other French cities, in the deprived banlieues, a war is going on. This is the French Intifada, a guerrilla war between the French state and the former subjects of its Empire, for whom the mantra of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' conceals a bitter history of domination, oppression, and brutality. This war began in the early 1800s, with Napoleon's lust for martial adventure, strategic power and imperial preeminence, and led to the armed colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and decades of bloody conflict, all in the name of 'civilization'. Here, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Andrew Hussey walks the front lines of this war - from the Gare du Nord in Paris to the souks of Marrakesh and the mosques of Tangier - to tell the strange and complex story of the relationship between secular, republican France and the Muslim world of North Africa. The result is a completely new portrait of an old nation. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, politics and literature with Hussey's years of personal experience travelling across the Arab World, The French Intifada reveals the role played by the countries of the Maghreb in shaping French history, and explores the challenge being mounted by today's dispossessed heirs to the colonial project: a challenge that is angrily and violently staking a claim on France's future.
Author: Mary Louise Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022613704X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
“A moving examination of how French civilians experienced the fighting” at Normandy during WWII from the acclaimed author of What Soldiers Do (Telegraph, UK). “Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges.” Silent parachutes dotting the night sky—that’s how one Normandy woman learned that the D-Day invasion was under way in June of 1944. Though they yearned for liberation, the French had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes, lands, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. With D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts turns the conventional narrative of D-Day on its head, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden—then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, then search for clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns to determine whether a bomb is whistling overhead or silently plummeting toward them. When the allied infantry arrived, French citizens guided them to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, What Soldiers Do, Roberts here sheds vital new light on a story we thought we knew. "In the great tradition of Studs Terkel and Is Paris Burning?, Mary Louise Roberts uses the diaries and memoirs of French civilians to narrate a history of the French at D-Day that has for too long been occluded by the mythology of the allied landing.”—Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French
