I've just started to learn French, and I picked up this dictionary before classes started because it was cheap and I figured I would need something to get started.

This dictionary does a pretty good job for the money. The verb tables could have been fleshed out a bit more, as there isn't many conjugations at all to rely on. Also, the instructor I have is big on phonetics, and many times this dictionary has had inaccurate or missing phonetic characters. Still, the scope of the dictionary is good, and it does give plenty of words to help somebody get through some French translation or sentence construction. It even includes a few short phrases in many of the word definitions, which always helps. It wasn't long before I picked up a huge Larousse dictionary, and I would recommend upgrading quickly for anyone interested in pursuing French past a basic level.

I got this dictionary to help me with some translations that I needed to make. Language studies is a hobby of mine and French for me was a great place to start. I have some friends from France and my aunt speaks the language fluently. Plus I'll be taking French as a high school course. So I got this dictionary and it was a great help for me and our foreign-exchange student. It contains pronunciations for the words both English and French. If you know how to use it, this is a great help with your basic French.

Modernity is what defines the work of Baudelaire. No elegant poems of love; no countryside-dreaming; no evocation of the Classics nor references to the past. On the contrary: urban life; the alienation brought aboout by capitalism; the angst of poor urban dwellers; alcohol and drugs. Poetry is no more just the search for beauty through words. Now, it is a vehicle for the expression of the individual. Content is more important than form, and therefore Baudelaire gets rid of the constraints imposed by verse, even free verse, and lets his soul spill out in a not lyrical, but dark manner.

These prose poems were my first experience with Baudelaire. I didn't know what to expect, but they're pretty good. They are often vague, but even then manage to be evocative. I'll admit I also bought the book to help my French along (as it is bilingual), but it's Baudelaire and it's good and sometimes thought-provoking reading. Enivrez-vous! De vin, de poesie, de vertu, a votre guise. Enjoy.

I came to this book as someone interested in new media rather than as an art historian, and I found it fascinating. Fried uses Diderot and other eighteen century art critics' writing to understand how the beholder of paintings is positioned. He uses an abundance of paintings (reproduced in good quality black and white) and citations of art criticism to show the ways in which painted characters ignore the beholder, first by being absorbed in quiet activities, and later in self-abandonment. While the beholder is clearly set apart from the represented world in history paintings, Diderot also writes about entering landscape paintings, stepping inside the world.

I found the book very readable and thought-provoking, and relevant to far more than just eighteenth century French art. Personally I will use it in relation to our current notions of immersion and interactivity.

I must admit this is a jolly spanking good book what? It is a simply fabulous source of precious knowledge and i do beleive it to be well worth the shillings.

I like it.

This translation of Surya's 1992 biography of the notoriously contradictory French writer contains nearly 500 pages of text supported by 86 pages of notes. It is the first full-length biography in either English or French. Bataille is decidedly an acquired taste, and this book may well persuade you to admire this neo-Sadean thinker who spent his nearly sixty-five years (1897-1962) as a "paleographic archivist" at the Bibliothèque Nationale and, finally, as the director of the Orléans Municipal Library. Anyone who can weave together Bataille's scatophilic and necrophilic obsessions with his literary themes and debauched private life as Surya has without sensationalism or prurience surely earns my admiration. Surya does full justice to his subject's innovative claims concerning the role of consumption in capitalist civilization; the negative features of so-called inner experience; the alleged links between eroticism and death; and the impossibility of community. Indirectly, Surya shows how Bataille's persistent preoccupation with the "informe" (formless) not only illuminates some of the most cutting-edge academic work in art history and literary criticism today, but also eerily foreshadows recent scientific theories of catastrophe, chaos and cosmic evolution. Surya is particularly good at displaying the development of Bataille's "impossible" thought against the background of French left-wing political activity and so successfully distances Bataille from any easy embrace of French (or German) fascism, a predilection for which hasty readers infer from his "The Psychological Structure of of Fascism" (1933)--the first analysis of its subject from a psychoanalytical point of view, according to Surya (p.177).
Surya's book is not an easy read, however, if you're expecting the straightforward prose of Deirdre Bair's studies of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin. Surya's is the prose of a philosophically trained literary man and not an historian. I would buy this book only if I were already pretty familiar with Bataille's work and wanted to situate it in his life and times. For a first look, I would turn to Allan Stoekl's introduction to a collection of Bataille's major essays entitled, "Visions of Excess" (1985).

On the cultural front, the French and we don't understand each other too well. Their nation has the gall to pick which wars it gets involved in, which American pop celebrities to lionize (Jerry Lewis?), and which supposedly marginalized groups to treat in a matter-of-fact fashion. Professor Henry Higgins' snide remark "The French don't care what you DO, actually, as long as you pronounce it properly," hints at a tolerance for today's more value-free environment in previously "controversial" areas of ground-breaking historical and cultural research.

Not to imply that the Fifth Republic is Nirvana for free speech, but at least Over There learned people can address a topic like homosexuality without first having to dash over the hot coals of bigotry and obfuscation so regularly, and dismayingly, laid down by self-appointed pundits, journalists, and other critics dispatched by the knee-jerk radical right.

That last, no-holds-barred quality is what makes possible HOMOSEXUALITY IN FRENCH CULTURE, a compendium of readable, even entertaining articles that focus on a particular kind of gay or lesbian community at particular times during the French historical experience. All the way from France's early nationhood to the present. Does this mean that the populace was way cool about homosex in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries? No, of course not. But the concept of a citizen's duty versus a private life sticks better in France than here.

French (homo)sexual life is enough like ours to be a mirror, and enough unlike ours to be a window. Many of this situations dealt with here have to do with accommodating what we would call sexual hypocrisy--but it's the Monty Python, "Wink, wink, say no more" type of hypocrisy. For example, Parisian male prostitutes of the late 19th Century had no recourse to health screening. Their desire: neither decriminalization nor unionization, but a plea for the same kind of semi-legal recognition (including mandatory doctor visits) that their distaff pros enjoyed! Probably the tipping point between labeling this approach "cynical" or "pragmatic" lies somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Not out and proud, but at least a demand for equal rights and rough justice.

The articles in this book are well-written in layman-friendly. At this point it's safe to say that the book was first written as an academic journal before the publisher realized its commercial potential. Except for the concluding article, which uses deconstructionist literary theory and along with it, that tedious, jargon-filled prose associated with the discipline, there is next to nothing of the schoolhouse about HOMOSEXUALITY IN FRENCH HISTORY AND CULTURE. A highly recommended book, if just to ask, "How would the USA have handled that problem? Would we have seen it as a problem? How have different cultures acknowledged (or ignored) their gayness?"

PS: James Baldwin's later biographical writings give poignance to the difference in American and French sociocultural perspectives. In the 1950s, this celebrated author was viewed in New York City as a "Negro" and treated badly if at all in Manhattan's best hotel, but in Paris he was a respected cultural figure: a civilized nation does not treat an artist poorly...

This book is very informative and is beautifully illustrated with fine colour plates and historically interesting black and white photos. There are many paintings in this collection that I was not aware of. It is wonderful for anyone, specificaly, whose favourite art period is mid to late 19th cent. French, or loves great art in general.

I just got this thing today. I have never looked at french before in my life. yes, I knew how to say hello, yes, no, please, and thank you, but that was it. Yes, I studied some spanish before, but I can only think of about 5 words that sounded close to the spanish equivalent. I won't say that I know all 200 or so of these words already, but I know most of them. The rest of the words don't sound as "foreign" to me right now either. Like the CDs say, don't beat yourself up if you don't remeber things well the first time though. And don't cheat by looking at the words first. This was a good introduction to accent as well. The only thing I didn't like was the effeil tower motif. Everything that sounds almost the same in french as english has the tower associated with it. by the end all these words were at the tower, on top of it, or being thrown off of it. That just doesn't give me good separate images. But oh well, those are usually easy anyway because they DO sound alike. Now i need some grammer. This course is also avalible in spanish, but more, more languages I say!

The book presents a very nice documentary narrative of the major events and circumstances of the French Revolution. Some entries are a bit puzzling, like the Diderot passage, and there are some gaps, such as Robespierre's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" (1793), but the overall value of the book is not diminished and can be supplemented by online sources (as was done in the class I took). Baker is, of course, a very fine intellectual historian, and his notes always provide sufficient transitions between the documents.

In this book, Garret moves away from his home in Rainbow to Los Angeles after his mother dies. His father left them a few years back and after his mother died, his father invites Garret to live with him. He then finds out some things about his father and he is faced with the decision to find out more about his father and learn to love him for who he is or to betray his father when he just started getting to know him better. Which path will Garret take? It is a great book and I highly reccommend it.