Catalog All books
Henri Atlan
Postgenomic Life, or What is Self-organisation?)
We spontaneously associate the idea of organisation with that of human production: the fruit of artistic endeavour or rational planning...
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Self-Organisation of Speech
The nature and evolution of language: the latest discoveries, at the crossroads of the neurosciences, linguistics and robotics
Michel Morange
Life, Evolution and History
In this unique general survey of contemporary research, Michel Morange reveals the recent convergence that is developing between two great segments of biology
Michel Delage, Boris Cyrulnik
Family and Resilience
This book delves further into the notion of resilience, examining it in the light of the family group.
Michel Cassé
The Genealogy of Matter
Atoms originate in the stars. There is no real separation between the Earth and the sky, and matter forms one great whole, based on a series of nuclear reactions. Written in a lyrical, poetic style, this is a concise, clearly illustrated account of the birth of matter, aimed at the general reader. Michel Cassé is an astrophysicist and researcher at the CEA and the Institut Astrophysique, in Paris. He is the author of Du Vide et de la Création and La Petite Etoile.
Michel Lemay
Autism Today
What do we know about autism today ? How can it be treated ? What is the cause ? In this book, the author offers a clear appraisal of the contributions and failures of various disciplines (psychoanalysis, neurobiology, genetics, chemical and drug treatment, and behavioural and cognitive therapies), and makes a case for a multidisciplary type of medicine. It offers both parents and professionals a great source of strength with which to fight against autism. Michel Lemay is a psychiatrist and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry. A world-renowned specialist in autism, he is the director of the clinic on autism and invasive development disorders at the Hôpital Sainte-Justine in Montreal.
Gilles Gaston Granger
Essay on a Philosophy of Style
This work offers a definition of the generalized concept of style, considered not only in an aesthetic manner but also as it applies to all human works. The author applies this concept first to mathematical works, and then to the more familiar realm of language, before sketching the project of a human sciences stylistic, complementing a history of knowledge and epistemology of structures. Gilles-Gaston Granger is a specialist in epistemology and an honorary professor at the Collège de France.
Gérard Apfeldorfer
Slimming: It’s All in the Mind
If to stay slim all one had to do was lose weight, then everyone (or nearly everyone) would succeed.
Daniel Nahon
How to Save Agriculture
Only a radical transformation of agriculture will enable us to feed all of humankind
Stella Baruk
Si 7 = 0. Quelles mathématiques pour l'école ?
Stella Baruk is known for her uncompromising criticism of the way mathematics is taught at school. She sees children's frequent aversion to the subject as a clear demonstration of the failure of current methods. Following her earlier book, L'Age du Capitaine, in which she denounced the meaningless mathematical problems that children were burdened with and enjoined to solve, she now addresses the difficulties encountered by the new generation of the captain's children. She has reproduced pages from the exercise books of primary school pupils, with a commentary underlining the confusion created by modern maths in the minds of children who are not yet familiar with mathematics. Her message is clear: the fault lies not in modern maths, but in the fact that the cart has been put before the horse. Modern maths was created to generalise operations and structures that recur in every aspect of mathematics, and modern maths cannot be correctly understood without the full mastery of those operations and structures. Yet, the teaching of mathematics has been turned on its head, with the abstract being taught before the concrete and the general before the specific - with the result that empty formalism is all that is being passed on. Baruk's very precise analyses, illustrated with specific examples, will help parents understand their children's mistakes and difficulties, so that they can help them overcome them. Stella Baruk is a mathematics teacher and pedagogical researcher.
Jean-Pierre Changeux
The Natural Foundations of Ethics
Is the sense of morality universal, is it inherent to human nature? The members of this symposium gathered around Jean-Pierre Changeux ponder the diversity of moralities and question themselves about the conflicts due to cultural differences and the possibility of attaining a common morality which would be intrinsic to human nature.
Didier Tabuteau
Health as Political Model
This exemplary X-ray of French healthcare argues for a total overhaul of the system
Geneviève Bédoucha
Lunar Eclipse in Yemen An Anthropologist's Emotions and Feelings of Bewilderment
This is a fascinating approach by a woman of a tribal society in a mountain valley in northern Yemen, near the Saudi Arabian border. Partly a travel book and partly a journal of the author's fieldwork, it restores an anthropologist's unique first-hand experience, questionings, hesitations and discoveries, from the first moments spent in an unfamiliar village. There are few anthropological works on Yemen, and even fewer about private life in rural societies in the hinterland of the former Arab Republic of Yemen (the author's fieldwork dates from the 1980s, before reunification). At the time, the presence of a female anthropologist led both men and women to talk openly, often jokingly and provocatively, of male-female relations, and it seemed to encourage women to voice strong criticisms of male behaviour and privileges. The women's comments reveal them to be lucid independent thinkers, and not at all submissive. This book is an invitation to discover a little-known rural community at close quarters, and to penetrate the secret universe of Yemen's many-storied mud houses. It reveals relations between men and women in a closed, but curious and hospitable, Muslim Arab society. An anthropologist and research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Geneviève Bédoucha is a specialist in the relations between socio-political structures and irrigation systems in Arabic and Islamic societies.
