Art and Literature All books
Michel Jouvet
The Castle of Dreams
Here is a novel written in the manner of the 18th century, intertwining fiction and science, meditation and reverie. M. Jouvet, a specialist in the neurobiology of dreams and a member of the Académie des Sciences, borrows the creative pen and documented dreams of Hughes la Scève, forgotten father of the science of sleep.
Jean-Didier Vincent
Celui qui parlait presque
When a rich English woman, a grouchy scientist, a bonobo monkey and a young man interested in religion meet together in a castle of Provence, what do they do? They talk. And what do they talk about? About the origins of life, the appearance of language, about the secrets of memory, or about the emergence of desire. Subtle and witty, J.-D. Vincent, a neurobiologist, author of The Biology of Passions, offers us here a defense and an illustration of material reason.
Manès Sperber
Being Jewish
A non-practicing Jew, Manès Sperber learned to read the Bible at the age of three and continued to re-read it until the end of his life. Neither religious, nor a militant Zionist, nor an aethiest, nor aligned with any cultural Judaism, he professes as his only faith a "religion of good memory." His is a Judaism lived as humanism and as an ethic, as a refusal of all idolatry, of exclusion of others, and a constant combat against hate of any kind. It is a profound attachment to the Israelite nation and a prudent attitude towards the State of Israel that Sperber illustrates in these brilliant essays prefaced by Elie Weisel, where analysis of Jewish thought and identity walk hand in hand with the eternal question: Why anti-semitism?