Catalog All books
Claudine Monteil
Simone de Beauvoir Today
The author evokes her long friendship with Simone de Beauvoir and offers a detailed portrayal of women’s lives today.
François Dalle
The L'Oréal Adventure
It is difficult to imagine that in 1948 L'Oréal was a small company operating mainly in France and in a few neighbouring countries. Over a period of 35 years, L'Oréal's annual revenue rose from $ 30 million to $ 3 billion. This book shows that money and classical management techniques played a minor role in L'Oréal's growth. For François Dalle the company's success can be explained by the wide acceptance by the staff to what he calls the "spirit of L'Oréal" : this is what enabled L'Oréal to diversify its activities, spread all over Europe, Japan and America and successfully manage the hard times of the 1970s and '80s. François Dalle managed L'Oréal from 1948, at first with Eugène Schueller, then as CEO, a position he held from 1957-1985.
Alain Prochiantz
Biology in the Bedroom
Inspiring himself from La Philosophie dans le boudoir by Sade and the major philosophical works of the 18th century, Alain Prochiantz, who is a neurobiologist, explains by means of a dialogue, the progress of embryology and neurobiology and gives us the elements so that we can understand and measure the stakes of the recent discovery of the genes of development. Alain Prochiantz heads the Laboratory for the Development and Evolution of the Nervous System at the École normale supérieure. He is notably the author of Strategies of the Embryo, and Claude Bernard, the Physiological Revolution.
Yves-Alain Fontaine
The Sentimental Evolution
In the course of development, our way of living is fashioned by the world around us, but it is also shaped by discrete characteristics such as nature and the intensity of emotions like anxiety and egoism. From this point of departure, the author draws analogies about the ways in which we are human individuals and members of a species, and proffers the theory that, in the evolutionary process, there is also a sort of anxiety and egoism at work. Evolution, he suggests, might very well be both sentimental and selective. Yves Alain Fontaine is an honorary professor at the National Museum of Natural History.