Entertaining mini-essays that debunk common idealized conceptions of the French.
In this debut, Eatwell pulls back the veil on France and French culture, exposing the truth behind 45 myths that have swirled around the French for ages.
Through research and interviews with countless English and French people, the author begins by examining the eating, drinking and bathing habits of the French. She intertwines historical facts with present-day evaluations, providing readers with in-depth analyses on a wide array of topics, including the eating of horse meat in France, the numerous types of cheese available and the subcultures that surround them, and the drinking habits of the old and young. She examines French toilets and plumbing, which body parts French women shave, if any, and the use of the bidet, which turned into a common feature in whorehouses; it was “the indispensable tool of the trade for the world’s oldest profession, a receptacle for ablutions, a cleansing contraceptive, purger of venereal disease, and in some cases an aid to home abortion.” Lovers of Paris will enjoy Eatwell’s chronicles of her journeys through the streets of the Left Bank in search of artists and writers, her descents into the Paris Metro and cataloging of its various smells. She also discusses the massive amount of canine excrement found on Paris streets. In addition, she follows the French on holiday as they flee the cities and migrate to the coast and tells all on French women going topless on the beaches. The French have influenced cultures around the world, but particularly that of the British, and Eatwell also studies the effects French food and culture have had on their neighbors across the Channel. At the end of each piece, the author provides a “myth evaluation” on the myth’s overall veracity.
Entertaining mini-essays that debunk common idealized conceptions of the French.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250053053
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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