Human Sciences All books

Jean-Denis Bredin
A Comedy of Appearance
A beautiful woman fascinated by her body, excludes herself from the world to love herself better... Two lovers tear each other apart after promising to always tell the truth to one another... Both cruel and funny, these short-stories describe the unease of a society, ours, which is dying of appearances, a society where everyone, man and woman, resembles what he she would like to be. Narcissism, lies, selfishness: the foundations of happiness are quite fragile nowadays. Through these acid portrayals, Jean-Denis Bredin, a lawyer and a writer, member of the French Academy, evokes a new era of suspicion.

Samuel P. Huntington
The Clash of Civilisations
This is the book to read to understand the contemporary world and the real threats that are arising.

Observatoire national de la lecture
Learning to Read
Learning to read is a continuous process which runs throughout primary and secondary school, and indeed through the whole of life. However, the crucial time is the first two years of primary school - it is at this time that the child learns the code of the written language and begins to undertake the reading of texts. This report summarises recent research by the best specialists working in the field and provides essential information on the thorny issue of children suffering from reading difficulties. The French National Reading Research Institute is a consultative body of the National Education Ministry and brings together teachers, researchers, school inspectors and representatives of the parents of pupils.

Roger-Pol Droit
If I Had Only One More Hour to Live
In this final, radical work, Roger-Pol Droit offers the reader a brilliant philosophy lesson

Marc Augé
Resuscitated
A realistic and almost contemporary story that questions the progress of medicine and our quest for immortality.

Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene has been described as the most important book about evolutionary theory since Darwin. According to Dawkins theory of the selfish gene, natural selection does not take place on the level of the species or of the individual but rather among genes. Dawkins argues that human beings are programmed to preserve their selfish molecules, which are known as genes. Dawkins brilliant style shows that complex scientific ideas can be explained and made accessible to the general public, and that biology can be as exciting as an adventure story. Richard Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist.

Michel Godet, Alain Lebaube, Philippe Ratte
Good News in France
“Once upon a time, there was a marvellous country called France, famed for its geographic and geologic variety as well as for its rich heritage and the diversity of its cultural traditions...

Claire Vajou
Iô
A testimonial that is as unbelievable as it is distressing, underpinned by superb writing

The Shift Project
Crisis, Climate How to Transform the French Economy
The Shift Project, a think tank created by Jean-Marc Jancovici in 2010, aims to clarify and influence the debate on energy transition.

Alain Bentolila
For a School of Resistance
An original and documented program of education policy that offers a response to the success of disinformation and extremisms confronting the young.

Françoise Héritier
On Violence A Seminar
How can violence can be put in the service of religion ? What political gains can be made from cruelty ? How does a belief system encompassing hatred end in the massacre of entire populations ? Through reflections on, amongst other things, the Bible, Muslim law, the situation in Colombia, the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi, this book, the product of a seminar organised at the Collège de France by Françoise Héritier in 1995, benefits from a multi-disciplined approach in order to identify and understand a phenomenon which has occasionally plunged societies into a destructive frenzy. Françoise Héritier is a professor at the Collège de France where she heads the Laboratory of Social Anthropology.

Évelyne Pewzner
The Guilt of Man (Coll. Opus) Fault and Insanity in the West
Why is the obsessive horrified by a tiny stain ? Why does the depressive relentlessly search for a redemptive punishment ? When human behaviour translates the suffering and helplessness of an individual confronted with anguish and solitude to the collapse of that being, to a retreat inside a strange inner world, to the loss of all that which anchors him to life, it is not enough, in order to understand him, to connect up the events of his life. It is also necessary to situate that individual in the wider scale of cultural indictations, which play a determining role in the formation of the personality. In this way, Évelyne Pewzner undertakes to show in what sense, Western Christianity, which is intrinsically linked to the problem of evil, leaves in each of us an imprint of distress. Évelyne Pewzner is a psychiatrist, and a professor of psychopathology at the University of Picardie.


















