Raymonde Carroll presents an intriguing and thoughtful analysis of the many ways French and Americans and indeed any members of different cultures can misinterpret each other, even when ostensibly speaking the same language. Cultural misunderstandings, Carroll points out, can arise even where we least expect them in our closest relationships. The revealing vignettes that Carroll relates, and her perceptive comments, bring to light some fundamental differences in French and American presuppositions about love, friendship, and raising children, as well as such everyday activities as using the...

Ivar Ekeland extends his consideration of the catastrophe theory of the universe begun in his widely acclaimed "Mathematics and the Unexpected, " by drawing on rich literary sources, particularly the Norse saga of Saint Olaf, and such current topics as chaos theory, information theory, and particle physics.
"Ivar Ekeland gained a large and enthusiastic following with "Mathematics and the Unexpected, " a brilliant and charming exposition of fundamental new discoveries in the theory of dynamical systems. "The Broken Dice" continues the same theme, and in the same elegant, seemingly...

Is ecology in the process of becoming the object of our contemporary passions, in the same way that Fascism was in the 30s, or Communism under Stalin? In "The New Ecological Order," Luc Ferry offers a penetrating critique of the ideological roots of the "Deep Ecology" movement spreading throughout Germany, France, and the United States.
Traditional ecological movements, or "democratic ecology," seek to protect the environment of human societies; they are pragmatic and reformist. But another movement has become the refuge both of nostalgic counterrevolutionaries and of leftist illusions....

When Nathan Wachtel, the distinguished historical anthropologist, returned to the village of Chipaya, the site of his extensive fieldwork in the Bolivian Andes, he learned a group of Uru Indians was being incarcerated and tortured for no apparent reason. Even more strangely, no one-not even his closest informant and friend-would speak about it.
Wachtel discovered that a series of recent deaths and misfortunes in Chipaya had been attributed to the evil powers of the Urus, a group usually regarded with suspicion by the other ethnic groups. Those incarcerated were believed to be the chief...

Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the centre of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. An exploration of the pig in Judeo-Christian culture and European anti-semitism, this work chronicles the cultural and religious character of a creature that occupies an ambiguous place in the families of those who raise them - at once nearly a member of the family and a potential meal. The author details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the...

Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the centre of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. An exploration of the pig in Judeo-Christian culture and European anti-semitism, this work chronicles the cultural and religious character of a creature that occupies an ambiguous place in the families of those who raise them - at once nearly a member of the family and a potential meal. The author details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the...

The Taste for Beauty is a collection of essays by the film-maker and critic Eric Rohmer which were originally written for the French Film review Cahiers du Cinema between 1948-1979. Rohmer, one of the founding members of the French 'New Wave' cinema, was also one of the journal's original critics and served as its editor. Divided into four sections, the essays deal with fundamental and theoretical questions of film-making from a single theoretical viewpoint. Rohmer, a film-maker of great eloquence and erudition, writes in depth on the issues most fundamental to film: what the camera best...

The fundamental gesture of weaving in The Craft of Zeus is the interlacing of warp and woof described by Plato in The Statesman--an interweaving signifying the union of opposites. From rituals symbolizing--even fabricating--the cohesion of society to those proposed by oracles as a means of propitiating fortune; from the erotic and marital significance of weaving and the woven robe to the use of weaving as a figure for language and the fabric of the text, this lively and lucid book defines the logic of one of the central concepts in Greek and Roman thought--a concept that has...

This powerful argument reassess radical Islam and the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. Olivier Roy offers a challenging and highly original view that no-one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.