I never thought that I could sympathize with a woman who threw furniture. Edith Piaf is so full of love in her honesty about her wretched start in life, that after a few chapters I was ready to forgive anything. Drug addiction, alchoholism, squandering money, desperate liasons, you name it, and this was the '50's. Is that Piaf singing on the old record in the subway scene in Amelie? Maybe that's why I bought the book but I liked it, anyway.

Cocteau is a genius. In Opium, Diary of a Cure, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. He gives an account that sometimes touches on his moment to moment experiences of drug withdrawal, sometimes remarks on his current thoughts about other people and things in his world. Since he lived in the world of avante-garde French culture, his comments include Picasso or Satie. His descriptions and criticisms include references to his own works or to the climate of the period and offer a stunning look at his own thoughts in this extraordinary moment.

Even though Edith Piaf herself faded into a history and became less famous in our generation, most of her songs are still alive in people's heart. Her songs like "La vie en rose" or "Autumn Leaves" have been sung by many famous artists in many different ways. If you still don't know who Edith Piaf was, think about recent Intel's TV commercial which a college kid boils water on a empty pot and takes a digital photo of it, then sents it to his mother for asking some money. The background music of that commercial was one of Piaf's songs "Non, je ne regrette rien". Even her songs and her career were like life of roses, her personal life itself was awful. This book introduces you almost forgotten French legend who was once known as a queen of French music industry...Great book. m.o.

I was so happy to find this book after thinking that 'Claudine and Annie' of the four Claudine books was the last we could read of her. In this book, Colette expands upon the friendship between Claudine and Annie, and shows what becomes of the latter's timid personality and what stepson Marcel has developed into. But Claudine is the same delightful Claudine, who writes of pain, of friendship, of personal relationships, of nature, of animals freely now, uninhibited by society. For how flowing and relaxing the book reads, there are some major changes to the plot, most noticably in the end. A lovely book for anyone who wants to keep up with Claudine, or who enjoys the later works of Colette.

In the first section, this book is the best set of personal memoirs I have ever read, surpassing even Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That". De Chirico could have been a great novelist, had he chosen that path. His descriptions of a childhood in Greece are unforgettable.

But his novel "Hebdomeros" was also a beautiful piece of writing. It's interesting that three major painters associated with surrealism, De Chirico, Dali and Magritte, were also great writers. (De Chirico would hate to be associated with surrealism, but like it or not - he's their Daddy.)

I'm disappointed in part II of the memoirs. I'm also disappointed in what de Chirico does not tell us in part I. He barely touches on his relationship with Apollinaire, wherein the poet would give titles to some of de Chirico's paintings. He doesn't mention his thoughts on learning of Apollinaire's death. He doesn't tell us which paintings he titled, and which were given names by Apollinaire.

On one page, Paul Eluard had good enough taste to purchase his paintings, and thus was not beyond redemption. Yet on the very next page, Eluard was an onanist and a mystical cretin. What happened in a few paragraphs to change his opinion of the man? De Chirico doesn't tell us, except to blame the corruption of Eluard on Andre Breton.

Many details important to students of the era were not even mentioned. Isabella Far is written about at length. Yet de Chirico does not even mention his wedding to her. They are companions for decades and suddenly, he refers to her as his wife. Duh? When did you get married? Where were you? What was the wedding like? Somebody correct me if I overlooked something.

He outlived almost all of his enemies, (and according to de Chirico, his enemies were more numerous than the stars in the sky). He outlived almost all of the surrealists. What did he think when learning of the deaths of Eluard or Breton? What was his opinion of Magritte, to whom he had once written a friendly thank you note? What was it Magritte had written to him?

Unfortunately, details like this are not to be found. Instead, we get an enemies list of Italian critics and modernist painters, whose names most readers in the English-speaking world will not recognize.

Even so, the character revealed in these memoirs is unique. He's obsessive, paranoid, romantic, imperious to the modern world, and at times comical. But he is always guided by a stubborn integrity and a search for what he called "mystery and poetry".

Yet, he is involved in such comical episodes. He's been accused of forging his early paintings and selling them. He's accused of denouncing some of his genuine early paintings as forgeries because he was jealous of the high prices they were drawing. His later work could not command such high prices. Even stranger and more ironic, he's accused of forging his own paintings and then denouncing his forgeries as forgeries!

Despite these absurd adventures, no painter ever left a body of work that was more replete with mystery. No painter was ever more poetic. Rene Magritte credits de Chirico with teaching him that the supreme art was poetry, and that a painter at his best, could be a poet with his brush and canvas.

More than any 20th Century painter, de Chirico's greatest paintings were like that. They were poems, songs of love. And they will haunt generations to come, long after Picasso, Matisse, and Monet have been forgotten. At their best, these memoirs are a haunting, unforgettable poem.

De Chirico, historically the first (small s) surrealist (even the Surrealists admit this) was exalted as a visionary for his earliest paintings, then conveniently vilified by his followers (led by the despicable Andre Breton) when he radically changed his style. The bitterness and frustration of this situation (and it was a long frustration -- De Chirco lived well into his nineties) is very much to the fore in this remarkable book. The mysterious qualities of his painting, too, are much in evidence, and great care is lavished on seemingly trivial incidents whose significance is left very much to the reader's own cogitations. Unforgettable are such passages as his defense of "maisons closes" (whorehouses) as decent workplaces, his memories of the Dalcroze-inspired Braun sisters, and the strange juxtaposition of his being required as a boy to kiss a priest's hand with the frustration of having always to refuse his barbers' offers of a rubdown. Not a book for everyone, surely, but for those seeking to unravel one of the great enigmas of 20th century art, essential. Footnote: De Chirico's status as a painter is currently going through a fascinating process of re-evaluation, and the "new" case for De Chirico is perhaps most eloquently put forth in a beautifully produced catalogue from Hunter College and the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa DeChirico in Rome, titled "Giorgio De Chirico and America," filled with superb reproductions, documentary photographs and stimulating essays.

This book is a very important book, historically. If you're looking to study the history of feminism, it's essential. Further, for someone who simply wishes to get a feel for just how far we've come in the last fifty years, it can be very informative to read this book, and see just what constituted "radical" feminist thought around 1950.

But if what you're interested in is cutting-edge, interesting, thought-provoking feminist theory, I'm afraid that this book no longer has what it takes. It was all of these things when it was written, and most of them as recently as the 1970s, but for a modern reader, most of de Beauvoir's concepts and arguments fall into one of three categories:

The first is the "Well, DUH!" category, in which she makes a large production out of an argument that has long since become generally accepted; only the most neanderthal sexist would still argue against the basic right of women to be treated on an equal basis with men in employment, or to be treated as, legally, an equal partner with their spouse in a marriage, for two of the most obvious examples. People may argue still about what exactly constitutes equal treatment, but almost no one would dispute the basic concept.

The second category, and even more unfortunate, is the category of arguments which have long since been discarded as themselves sexist; for all of her attempts to be radical, she was still a product of her time, and rather a lot of ideas got past her internal screen. The most obvious example of this category is her blind acceptance of the claim, then popular among most gynecologists (which of course, at the time, meant "most male gynecologists", since there were very few of any other kind) that almost all menstrual or pre-menstrual difficulties experienced by their patients had no physical cause, but were in fact caused by a psychological problem with accepting their femininity. De Beauvoir, of course, puts a more tolerant spin on this outdated claim, suggesting that it is only REASONABLE that women would have difficulties accepting the demands put upon them by society's reaction to their gender, but that doesn't change the fact that she accepts the basic premise itself, a premise that has long since been recognised (at least by feminists) as patent hooey. There are a great many physical causes of menstrual difficulties, and if there are occasional instances of neurotic triggers, that doesn't make the statement "I can't find a physical reason for your problem, therefore there isn't one," an acceptable diagnosis.

The third category of argument in this book, at least for the reader unschooled in existentialist psychobabble and/or marxist dialectic, is the "WHAT did she just say?" argument. In spite of claims to the contrary in the introduction, this book is rather heavy going for the reader not familiar with the catch-phrases and pet terms of those disciplines. Terms like "immanence", "transcendance", and such are liberally sprinkled throughout the text, and it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the usage. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does make the book rather inaccessible to the average reader.

I do NOT recommend this book to the general public; for committed historians, particularly historians of the feminist movement, there is much to be learned from it. But for the general reader, it has long since lost the relevance that made it worth the effort to parse the 814 pages of impenetrable language.

Simone de Beauvoir was the founder of neo-feminism, but her deepest affinity was with Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. This is made utterly apparent in this book. Beauvoir was still passing out Maoist leaflets in the 1970s, years after Mao's crimes against humanity were well-known. To understand the legacy of American feminism, you have to explore the founder's orientation.

While Simone de Beauvoir grew up in one of the most privileged families in France and went to all the best institutions, and never worked a day in her life, she nevertheless, along with a great number of the French left, fell under the sway of Chairman Mao in the 1950s and never recovered. A companion volume to this read would be Julia Kristeva's Chinese Women.

The two of these feminists, still considered stellar intellectuals in the world of women's studies, were both simply Maoists for a great part of their life, and a great deal of their thinking went into supporting and amplifying the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Cultural REvolution is now being relived in every women's studies program in America.

Read this book. It is central to understanding the French mentality in the 1970s and the American mentality today in women's studies.

Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, and remains the foundation of the feminist movement. Unfortunately, I feel that it has become severely dated, which detracts from the advantages of reading this work.

I felt that the first third of the book, dealing with philosophy (particularly existentialism), and Freudian psychoanalysis, was not as interesting or informative as the latter parts of the book. While some people may disagree, I tend to dislike using a lot of big words to describe simple things, as often happens with philosophers and psychoanalists.

The remainder of the book, dealing with women at different times of their lives, or in different situations, was stronger. Its major deficiency was its being dated, but a large number of her arguments are very relevant today. Many of her then novel reasonings are now standard modern political fare, for example, her arguments about abortion. It was interesting to see them in the original.

Overall, despite its importance, I cannot give this book five stars. It has simply lost too much relevance over the years. The best arguments from this book have become part of the standard fare, while the weaker ones have been lost in time. A modern reader of this book will not gain much insight into women as they are now, but merely a historical view of women and the feminist movement. While this is still a worthwhile goal, "The Second Sex" is simply not as important as it once was.

Like other eighteenth-century "libertine novels," especially Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, The Crimes of Love tells us what happens when extremely virtuous characters collide with extremely evil ones. And as with other classic writers of the late eighteenth century, the French here is easy for foreign readers. But by contrast with the novels (and the real-life acts) that have given Sade such a bad reputation, these stories are economical and interest us far more through psychology than through cruelty or perversion. To the five entertaining stories he has selected, Michel Delon adds the author's "Idea on novels" and an informative dossier.

This review is based on the French edition published in Gallimard's Folio series. The only recent translation (out of print) was published in the textually unreliable Bantam Classics series. A new translation of these stories would be a worthy project for an intermediate or advanced student of French.

This is better than the last book I read of Marquis de Sade's. However,...I have discovered that the other book was one of his worst but was still great. This book is about many sexual encounters that many people have. It's just very interesting and highly recommended. Can't say more than that.

As one might surmise from the title, this French procedural starts with the discovery of a young Thai girl who has been raped and tortured to death. Set in 1980, this murder sets in motion a stunningly complicated investigation by Inspector Dacquin and his team, which winds its way through immigrant worker politics, the international heroin trade, French-Iranian relations, child prostitution, Turkish domestic politics, police and government corruption, a private club, blackmail, the CIA, front companies, and most of all, the grimy Sentier district in Paris.

The somewhat choppy narrative takes place over a month, with lots of cutting between different locations and perspectives. It's a bit off-putting at first, but by the second half of the story, there have been enough new murders and complications so that one isn't so distracted. There book does suffer from a lack of distinction amongst all the cops. Other than the lead inspector Dacquin, the other cops are interchangeable and unmemorable, which is a bit of a problem since there are at least four of them running around at any one point. Manotti treats them more as Dacquin's pawns than real characters, which is a bit of a shame. Similarly, there are a huge number of people interviewed and interrogated, and they too, tend to run together. To keep everything straight, I recommend readers keep a running list of whom everybody is as they read.

It should be said that the book is unrelentingly grim and cynical, which some may not care for. The French cops don't mess around, beating suspects, blackmailing informers, and generally operating by whatever means necessary. It has one of the better climaxes I've come across recently though, very realistic I felt. And there's a fun little epilogue which really ends thing on just the right note. Manotti has written at least two other Dacquin books, but they've not been translated into English.

FYI, this book is also known as "Dark Path", which is the more literal translation of the original French title. Also, Manotti is a pseudonym.

I thought the book did very well in revealing the great yet mysterious past of some of operas greatest exponents, the castrati. Through their eventful history vocal technique was able to reach past its highest peaks, and audiences were able to be thrown, into raptures of ecstatic bliss, by listening to the angelic voices in all their skill.... and unassailable perfection of the greatest singers our world has known through the music of some of the greatest composers. However petty some may make themselves in attacking the style of the author or some phrase he was supposedly ridiculous to have uttered in the book, Patrick Barbier indeed accomplished much in revealing to us in wonderful detail the history of music's glorious past. I also wish to thank him for all that he has given me through the publishing of this great book.

Kahlil Gibran's "Eye of the Prophet" is a collection of meditations on religion and life. Gibran's writing is both mystical and lyrical as he comments on truths he's learned throughout life. Although he believes in an inexplainable God, Gibran also posits that religion has a practical side. For example, "to be closer to God, be closer to people." Although God exceeds our understanding, we can approach Him through other human beings. In this book Gibran also explains that people often obscure their true, divine, selves; this leads to misery. This concept is explored in the following story: "I saw a young man trying to seduce the heart of a young girl with tender words, while the true feelings of both were half asleep and they were very far from their divine nature." The same theme of human nature being basically good, despite self-corruption, continues throughout the book. Gibran's ideas will likely not shock those readers who are familiar with mainstream religions and the Bible: Gibran himself drew heavily on the Bible. Although I enjoyed the book, I found I had to break it up and read small sections at a time. Too much "Eye of the Prophet" at once made me feel simultaneously overwhelmed and skeptical. Overall, I found the book provocative and beautifully-written, if at times a little repetitive.