Catalog All books
Robert Rochefort
A Consumer Society
This book demonstrates how with households equipped and individuals saturated, consumption must respond to other, more immaterial needs. The new markets are those which can reassure people : healthcare, ecology, land, family and even solidarity.
Colin Powell, Joseph E. Persico
My American Journey
Colin Powell is the incarnation of the American dream. Born of Jamaican parents, he lived a tough urban life before embarking on a brilliant career in the army, then at Washington. The rest is history. The man who was once at the head of the United States Armed Forces, and is today one of the most important figures in American politics recounts his progression in life : from the dangers of Vietnam to the garrisons of Korea, from the deep South to the corridors of the Pentagon and then the White House, under Reagan and Bush, at the time of the Star Wars, Irangate, and the Gulf War. With the collaboration of Joseph E. Persico.
Pierre Karli
The Brain and Freedom
What is the relationship of man with the world, the others, with himself? To this perpetual question, many answers have been given by the various, religious or philosophical systems of thought. Pierre Karli, a neurophysiologist, proposes to look in the direction of science. He shows, by synthesizing the most advanced scientific works, how individual freedom finds its roots at the very heart of the brain.
Robert Darnton
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
At the beginning of 1778, Franz-Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris where he set about expounding his rather exotic theory - that the universe was swimming in a fluid which was responsible for occurences such heat, light, electricity and magnetism, but it was this fluid's relevance to medicine which he wished to highlight. In order to restablish health and man's harmony with nature he undertook strange healing sessions which became the origins of an extraordinary craze. Quickly, mesmerism became a disguised political theory. In demonstrating the links of mesmerism to politics, and the scientific notions of the age, Robert Darnton provides in this work a decisive contribution to the study of the diffusion of ideas in French society at the end of the 18th century. Robert Darnton is a professor at the University of Princeton
Guiliana Gemelli
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel is considered as one of the major historians of the XXth century. Making his stand against factual history, he was one of the founders of the triumph of new history: the history of human societies rooted in their geographical space and obstinately determined to produce their material civilization there. This biography takes its strength from friendly conversations between Braudel and Giuliana Gemelli, who because she is Italian, had the necessary distance to make a demanding quest.