Louis Crocq, Sophie Huberson, Benoît Vraie

Managing Crises

In the existence of any group, business or nation, a crisis is a serious, uncommon event that suddenly imposes an emergency situation and the management of the vital issues at stake.

Monique Sicard

The Making of the Image

It was during the Renaissance that images and pictures were first used by anatomists, microscopists, and astronomers as scientific tools. In that era, scientific images served as a kind of inventory of the known world. In the 19th century, the popularization of scientific ideas gave science a new vigor. Photographic images gave science a new reality, explaining and legitimizing scientific concepts--movement, for example--to a fascinated public. In our days, the scientific image is often a construction--helping us to represent objects and ideas that, like fractals or black holes, cannot be defined through actual observation. Monique Sicard is Projects Director at CNRS Images Média.

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.

Didier Houssin

Let’s Take Care of Science!

Well-written, eloquent, exhibiting great depth, the book is both an ode to science and a reflection on the recent tendency toward gigantism, encouraged primarily by Big Data.

Luc Ferry, Axel Kahn

Legalize Euthanasia?

Based on a comparison of euthanasia legislation in several countries and an analysis of specific cases revealing the paradoxes of contemporary individualistic values...

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.

Goéry Delacôte

Learning to Learn New Methods

Régis Debray

Learning About Religion in Secular State Schools

Learning about different religions: the best way of overcoming prejudice