‘Majestic, ambitious' Literary Review _________________________________________________________________________________________ We are endlessly fascinated by the French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity, sophistication and self-assurance, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But how did France become the country it is today, and what really sets it apart? Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these questions in The French Mind, a dazzling history of France that takes us from the seventeenth century to the present day through the nation’s most influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance salons that were a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells the forgotten stories of the extraordinary succession of women who ran these institutions, fostering a culture of stylish intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the world. It’s a story that takes us into Bohemian cafes and cabarets, into chic Parisian high culture via French philosophies of food, fashion and sex, while growing unrest hastens the bloody birth of a republic. From the 1789 revolution to the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, Watson argues that a unique series of devastating military defeats helped shape the resilient, proud, innovative character of the French. This is a history of breathtaking ambition, propelled by the characters Watson brings to vivid life: the writers, revolutionaries and painters who loved, inspired and rivalled one another over four hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global influence, in art, culture and politics, cannot be overstated. _____________________________________________________________________ ‘An encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, rooted in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity’ The Times 'An engaging movement through time towards France’s recent reckonings with extremism, exceptionalism and empire’ TLS

Violence was prominent in France?s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France?s empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

In 1951, the eight o’clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book. Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization, Turning On the Mind claims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression.

"Nancy French, columnist for 'The Philadelphia Daily News' and a former beauty queen from red-state Tennessee, tells what it's like to live in blue-state New York in this humorous memoir"--Provided by publisher.

Low self-esteem is an epidemic among American women. In the United States, 67% of women are dieting at any given time; an additional 10% have an eating disorder; and 80% of ten-year-old girls have already tried dieting. Trapped by a compulsive need to conform to arbitrary societal standards of beauty, American women have lost their sense of self. The Skinny, Sexy Mind is here to change all that. Author Trish Blackwell knows what its like to fall into the trap of unrealistic expectations. A born overachiever, she always expected perfection of herself. She bought into Americas skinny revolution and battled an eating disorder in her quest for flawlessness. But when she moved to France, her understanding of beauty and her body were transformed into a powerful new joie de vivre that redefined her personal confidence and quality of life. The Skinny, Sexy Mind is a groundbreaking, searingly honest challenge to American women, who desperately need to retrain their minds and lifestyles. This is a book with the power to change lives and to save future generations from the lies and damage of the American culture of beauty.

Germán T. Cruz is a landscape architect by profession and vocation with a wide path of practical engagement in urban and residential design across the USA and several countries. In addition to professional practice from his studio, Professor Cruz teaches at the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State University where he leads graduate and undergraduate design studios on urban design, graphic communications, parks, regional design, and open space as well as lecturing on design theory, technology and materials, contemporary history of urban design, and philosophy of landscape architecture. In 2010 he walked on the Road of Saint James through southern France and northern Spain from Le Puy en Velay to Santiago over 3000 km in 66 days. The result of this journey was a design meditation and travelogue under the title Walking to Know that was published recently by Xlibris. A collection of his poems has also been published in a bilingual edition (Spanish/English) under the title Poemas Veniales/Venial Poems.