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Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Anne de Kervasdoué
Women are Not Just Men
The changes which have come to be in the second half of the 20th century have taken women a long ways from the profile adopted by their mothers. Do all these transformations lead us to trace the portrait of a woman who has become a clone of men ? We can ask ourselves this question when we remember the arguments of feminists in the 70's employing the "egalitarian" themes of Simone de Beauvoir. More recently, some have gone so far as to announce the coming of an "androgynous" society. But what do the women and the men of this country think about all this ? How do women see themselves in relation to men ? How do they define themselves and how do they describe the men of their lives ? A very pointed realization of today's female identity. Janine Mossuz-Lavau is Director of Research at the CNRS.
Antoine Garapon
Judging Well Essay on Judicial Ritual
Imagine for a moment that you assist at a trial for the first time. There is no doubt that you would be struck by the strange procedure which happens in front of you, the judicial discussions. It is true to say that before being a moral faculty, judging is firstly an event. According to the author, before there were laws, judges and courthouses, there was a ritual. This book aims to unveil all these facets, showing by example how the public gallery is there to culpabilise and inhibit the defendant, in order to make him submit to the judicial order. Can judges avoid staging trials in order to judge well ?
Bernard Diu
Do atoms really exist ?
Few scientific notions have aroused the speculative imagination like the thermodynamic entropy. All organised systems - societies, living creatures - are destined without exception to decline and eventual death. This book clearly exposes the historical and conceptual development of thermodynamics. Born from a desire to understand and master steam powered machines - the symbol of our industrialised societies - it became the science of the human body. However, it was suddenly passed over in favour of the theory of atoms. It was thus demolished by statistical mechanics which ceded to the imperatives dictated by the atomical structure of the body. After an epic struggle, sometimes quite ferocious, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have been reconciled by adopting the base of the second with the techniques of the first. This book reads like a novel about contemporary physics. Bernard Diu, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieur, is a professor at the University of Paris VII.
