I read this book after hearing it recommended on NPR. It was hard when coming to the book to disassociate Kauffmann's incredible and horrible experiences as a hostage in Beirut from my appreciation of the book itself. Every piece of ennui, every flat, sad phrase seemed to take me back to the chair in which he was blindfolded and chained for three years. I think it would be impossible not to attribute some significance to his past, but it is something Kauffmann fails to address in any way at all. (It is mentioned only in passing on the book jacket.)

What we find instead is a troubled man coming to terms with a troubled place. But here his insights aren't very deep. He seems utterly amazed that this place, so far away from anywhere, is still France. This is an glimpse into the Gallic mindset that perhaps only an Englishman could appreciate. He also feels very impressed with being there. He seems to pinch himself a lot. Wow, I am in Kerguelen! Apparently, it's windy.

His attempts at a back story -- his attempts to show why this place has haunted him for so long are unconvincing and rather dull. He includes what history he could find about the place, but, sadly, there isn't so much. For an example of this type of writing at its finest, I would check out Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and Kevin Patterson's excellent The Water Inbetween. Both of these books come from similar emotional places, but engage the reader in more interesting and varied ways.

This book is neither a travelogue (in the usual sense), a natural history treatise, nor a serious historical overview of the French islands of Kerguelen (also called Desolation Island.) Although there are some evocative phrases that approach description (for example, "it's the land of 'the eternal late autumn.'"), author Jean-Paul Kauffmann never seems to get around to actually describing much more than the ever present wind.

Why travel to Kerguelen? Well, there's a rock arch. And a failed explorer. And it's difficult to get to. But overwhelmingly, one gets the feeling that the author made this journey because he couldn't think of anything better to do.

Not that that's a bad idea, mind you. But once he's arrived, he doesn't seem particularly interested in either noticing details or passing them on. His historical snippets of earlier explorers are truncated and flimsy. And he seems completely uninterested in the other human beings whom he encounters. Perhaps it's because most of them are scientists.

I betray my interest in natural history by pointing out that every time Jean-Paul Kauffman gets to an interesting fact or description of this most remote of all places on earth, he punts it by either declaring that science has taken the poetry out of nature-- the man has obviously never read Loren Eiseley-- or adds it as an unexplained addendum ("...the meteorite lying amid the ruins is like the dead soul of Port Jeanne d'Arc..." Hey, wait a minute, what meteorite?)

Despite its flaws, or possibly because of them, this book entices you to learn more. One hopes that the next adventurer to Kerguelen arrives with an actual sense of adventure and the descriptive power to pass it on.

The author makes a pilgrimage to the islands in the southern Indian Ocean which have been called the most desolate on earth since their discovery in 1772. His travelogue, The Arch Of Kerguelen, explores the islands, their wildlife, and their history in an intriguing study.

A tragically desperate attempt of Bianca Lamblin, the "contingent" by-product of the Simone de Beauvoir/Jean-Paul Sartre "essential" relationship, to retrospectively appropriate her life after Journal de guerre and Letters to Sartre revealed all the chilling detachment with which Simone de Beauvoir adroitly manipulated her as the unsuspecting victim of the "threesome." Despite her claim to have finally regained the status of a subject of her own story, Lamblin's final stance as a victim undermines her narrative. One almost wishes she would have stopped a couple of paragraphs short of the end. Her final decision to reject the experience as "having done her only wrong" leaves her with all the pain she tried to alleviate by writing.

She started the book with a purpose of making her life cohere in the face of betrayal. Her naive loyalty and guilelessness help her "cling instinctively to life," as she seems to find consolation in her simple moral choices and unselfish devotion. Despite her plain, predictable, unengaging style, I sympathized with Lamblin in her struggle to maintain a precarious balance between objectivity and self-vindication. She tries to distance herself from Simone de Beauvoir, stressing their differences and disengaging herself from her famous lover's philosophical influence by reclaiming her own war-time experience as a Jew and choosing to have a family and children. And yet she continues to be constantly tormented by her inferiority to the existential duo - her attacks on Sartre's "revolutionary" ideas, for instance, remain purely emotional. She is profoundly not at peace with herself, irritated, angry, and oftentimes behaves like a hurt child, throwing the same words back at her offenders ("Truly, I would call THEIR intelligence monstrous and at the same time downright feeble").

And yet her innate grace and her perhaps never completely squelched attachment to "the Beaver" make her stop short from launching an open smearing campaign. Because she is keenly aware that the reader will be perceiving her book as an attempt at "retributive justice," she makes an effort to stay as objective as possible, which, in my opinion, is exactly what prevents her from venting her hurt feelings. Despite a simplified Lacanian explanation of her life Lamblin offers at the very end of the book, her story is a tragic example of an unresolved conflict.

But perhaps what vindicates her is a sense the reader gets of a fundamental private turmoil and instability on which Simone de Beauvoir's seemingly "philosophically justified" world was based. It comes as a nice reprieve for someone who was tempted to make her ideas from The Second Sex into life principles.

On the surface, A Disgraceful Affair is Bianca Lamblin's account of her brief triangular relationship with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and how that affair affected her life long after Sartre's, then Beauvoir's, romantic interest waned. Its carefully guarded sentences reveal a woman who has been deepley hurt by her mentors but who is being painstakingly careful in her effort to be fair as she sets the record straight. Readers looking for juicy tidbits will need to look elsewhere (Lamblin describes Sartre as a charming wooer but an unskilled lover, and does not waste ink elaborating).

If the reader takes the facts as the author presents them--and there is nothing implausible or erractic in what Lamblin relates--what unfolds is a brief, startlingly clear reflection on what it means to evolve one's own workable philosophy of life based on the cards one is dealt and the living examples one has to choose from. After her rejection by her existentalist mentors, Lamblin consciously chose a conventional, slightly leftist, life. Her mentors' narcissism seems to have turned her away from a life focused on pursuing celebrity and getting published (aside from a few academic philosophy articles, A Disgraceful Affair is Lamblin's only published work, one she didn't begin writing until she was in her seventies and all the key figures in the story had died). Unlike her mentors, she chose to marry and have children, decisions that disturbed and disgusted Beauvoir.

Those looking for portraits of Sartre and Beauvoir should know that Beauvoir (unfortunately called "the Beaver" throughout the book, a nickname that might have been better left untranslated) is the more fully realized. Lamblin renewed her relationship with Beauvoir after the War and continued to have platonic meetings with her for the rest of Beauvoir's life. Lamblin's depiction of Beauvoir's life after Sartre's death is one of profound pathos and emotional disenfranchisement. By that point, Beauvoir's alcoholism was quite advanced and the reader senses that the great thinker and prolific writer's death must have been a lonely, troubled, and confusing end indeed.

The reader should be warned that there is a sort of craftlessness to Lamblin's writing. For me, this added to the sense of authenticity of what she was attempting to communicate. She often tells the reader what she is going to say--or why she is relating a particular incident--before launching into her account of an event. This tends to pull the reader up short. As off-putting as this might be, for me it further convinced me of the author's essential guilelessness and I ultimately judged this practice as awkward but not offensive. In addition, I suspect that Julie Plovnick's translation of the French original is a little wooden and literal-minded (for instance, she translates "lucide" as "lucid" in a context where I suspect "perceptive" might have been the intended meaning).

Readers interested in the way people, and especially women, make meaning of the troubles life throws their way will enjoy this book. Other books along this line that I have enjoyed are Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, The Liar's Club by Mary Karr, and A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten.

Sartre & two British psychiatrists might seem like strange bedfellows. But Laing & Cooper took Sartre's theory of practical groups to heart & produced the still-controversial social movement called antipsychiatry.

Reason & Violence is a compendium of three of Sartre's works published betw. 1950 & 1960. Saint Genet was the 1952 bio. in which Sartre mused that playwright-pervert-pickpocket Jean Genet had achieved something approximating a psychoanalytic cure by becoming what others said he was & producing similar fictional characters. Laing & Cooper also reduced to a few pages Search for a Method & Critique of Dialectical Reason, writings which shaped in part Sartre's philosophy during his last 30 years.

The intro noted that they were dealing with key ideas here; moreover, none of these works had been translated into English at the time L&C tackled them. Despite brevity (compared with the originals), this is often difficult material to wade thru. The editing leaves much to be desired, & the language is frequently awkward & stilted. But it remains an original & a highly literate work of first magnitude.

After all, who could write this today? The dung heap of pop culturalists all want to write fiction with a message. They want to write Moby Dick while they lecture Ahab on his political incorrectitude. They want to put Holden Caulfield in a 12-step program & scold his parents. But they lack any sense of drama or character development, so they write Winning thru Intimidation, The Se7en Habits, Cultural Literacy, & The End of History: metaphorical accounts of modern society. And if they're not writing for mass market, then it's for each other & more govt. grants to research, say, prison conditions for Mary, Queen of Scots.

Marshall McLuhan supposedly wrote that schizophrenia was a necessary consequence of literacy. If that's true, our pop commentators are safely sane.

Not so Laing & Cooper. Reason & Violence is maddening in its content. In a foreward, Sartre himself praises them for seeking an existentialist explanation to the mentally sick. And we shall not soon see its (or their) like again.

this book is a very good and philosophical book. i enjoyed it alot. anyone who is interested in Philosophy should read this book. it has many aspects that startle as you are reading it. every single paragraph has something to make you go really?

therefore you should read this book for sure.

The topic matter of this study--the interface between the sciences of neurobiology and philosophy as they try to resolve the mind-body problem of dualism vs. monism--is extremely promising, and the participants in the debate (Jean Changeux and Paul Ricouer) are eminetly qualified to attend to it. Their discussion is exciting and thoughtful, though it is marred by their lack of a common language (which seems to undermine their whole strategy from the beginning). They can't even agree at times on basic terms, and at times they try to cover these differences by engaging in an irritating exchange of name-dropping (thereby belying the claim on the book's dust jacket that this book is accessible to non-specialists--you're expected not only to know who Kant and Spinoza are and what they've said on the subject, but also the Churchlands, Eccles, etc.) and "mutual admiration society" overpraising of one another. You do come to learn the impasses in their respective disciplines in speaking to one another, but the book seems very scattershot and happenstance. It seems like a noble project that failed due to a lack of structure and to the participants' oversized egos.

This book will blow your mind, er, your mind. Um, well, which is it?

This exchange between the Neuro-Scientist and the Philosopher is utterly gripping - but only if you are willing or caoable of the sustained concentration needed to acquire the sophisticated arguments and subtle differentiations that they each make. It is worth doing so.

In an age where scientistic triumphalism feels no need to explain itself, its methods, or its assumptions, to a public capable of understanding it (i.e., after the destruction of our education systems and the dumbing down used by the media and the government to prevent any meaningful "political" debate - i.e., the "political" as "that which concerns us all"), this book is some kind of touchstone - and a dozen similar books should be following it on a dozen different science/philosophy topics. For starters, who is informed enough at this level (which this wise people make so accessible to the willing reader) on: stem cell research, the origins of the universe, surveillance technologies, and so many other scientific "advances".

If this is the standard of public discourse in France, we are all sadly stupid in comparison.

We need such before we perish from our ignorance.

This book deserves no stars. This is the worst guidebook I have ever used! The information is inconsistent and not organized well. It lacks a language section. I found the references to "clubs for men" offensive. In addition, this book included inaccurate generalizations of the women in Honduras. Although this book is in its fifth edition, there are still several errors in it. I would have been better off using the Rough Guide to Central America.

I brought two guidebooks with me on my recent trip to Honduras, which is an amazing country to visit by the way, and this book was the better resource by far. (The other book was Lonely Planet's Central America on a Shoestring.) J.P. Panet writes about Honduras with sincere affection for its people and a sensitivity to their culture. Hotel and restaurant listings are comprehensive, phone numbers are accurate (not so with Lonely Planet's book), and descriptions are useful. I almost didn't buy this book because of another review on (...) site, but I'm glad I ignored it!

"Political correctness" has made it difficult to challenge even that part of the thesis of the Fullbrooks' book, Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend, which relates strictly to the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, challenged it must be, and has been, contrary to the claims of Sharon Wright in her online review. What she calls their "impressive scholarship" has come under serious and precise attack from a number of quarters. What follows is simply the lead-in to an article that I myself published as early as 1995 ("Sartre and Beauvoir: Refining rather than 'Remaking' the Legend", Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 12, 1995, pp. 91-99); the rest of that article goes on to justify my claims in detail.

"The crux of their argument is the assertion that Sartre's reading of the draft of L'Invitée during his leave in Paris between 4 and 16 February 1940 was what provided him with all or most of the crucial ideas that were to form the substance of L'Etre et le Néant. [...] Now, there are least four MAJOR flaws in this line of argument: (i) we do not know with certainty exactly what was in the parts of L'Invitée that Sartre read in February 1940; (ii) the argument ignores completely Beauvoir's acquaintance with drafts of Sartre's L'Age de raison, and also seriously underplays the philosophical content of those of Sartre's Carnets de la drôle de guerre that Beauvoir had read before February 1940; (iii) we DO know that Sartre had been working since the mid-1930s on the ideas that were to be central to L'Etre et le Néant; (iv) the momentous philosophical system that the Fullbrooks ascribe to Beauvoir is simply not to be found in even the final version of L'Invitée."

Since, as Sharon Wright points out, the Fullbrooks were far from the first to argue for the philosophical originality of Beauvoir, those of their claims that are demonstrably false have done nothing to promote this case. Rather, they have tended to obscure, and direct attention away from, many of the complex and fascinating questions concerning the relationship between the thought of Beauvoir and that of Sartre. What is more, some of the sensationalist, journalistic features of the style of the book have served to inflame sensitive issues that require particularly cool, rational treatment.

No book on Beauvoir or Sartre has led to so much discussion, provoked such consternation or so changed the way we see these cultural icons as has Kate and Edward Fullbrook's "Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend". The basis of this recently republished book (which I had the pleasure of rereading last week) is disarmingly simple. The Fullbrooks checked out Beauvoir's and Sartre's newly-available letters and diaries and found that the traditional story that says the Beauvoir constructed her first novel "She Cme to Stay" on the basis of philosophical ideas she took from Sartre's essay "Being and Nothingness" is the exact opposite of the truth. Sartre only began, the Fullbrooks carefully document, to compile notes hor his philosophical treatise after studying the second draft of Beauvoir's novel. The Fullbrooks also, and again drawing on the letters, make the case that it was Beauvoir's sexual promiscuity, rather than Sartre's that initially dictated the famous open terms of their 50-year relationship. All this radical post-patriarchal revisionism, which the Fullbrooks refused to play down, was too much for many critcs when this book appeared in 1994. Some reviewers were apoplectic, others deeply sceptical, and the "New Yorl Times" twice ran long reviews warning their readers against this "feminist claptrap". But in fact the Fullbrooks, in claiming philosophical originality for Beauvoir, were themselves not so original as perhaps they and certainly their critics imagined. Margaret Simons, Linda Singer and Sonia Kruks had previously argued the case for Beauvoir as an innovative philosopher and the source of some of Sartre's later ideas. The Fullbrooks' discoveries gave new significance to this prior scholarship and inspired Simons to go off in search of Beauvoir's student diaries. (See Simons 1999) Simons's subsequent discoveries and the slow but continuing cultural shift away from presuming that women are never the source of original ideas has taken away some of the shock value of the Fullbrooks' first book. Indeed, seven years on and their impressive scholarship has never been seriously challanged. By now scores of Sartre scholars much have checked out the letters and diaries and found, to their dismay, that the Fullbrooks did not make any of it up. But although "Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend" through its success no longer enjoys the controversy it once did, it remains, with its compelling narrative and writerly qualities, one of the best books evr written about either Beauvoir or Sartre. Even the "New York Times" had to admit that it was good read. For capturing the spirit of these twentieth-century giants and their extraordinary relationship, this book is yet to be beaten.

While the premise is intriging, the final result and manner in which she presents her arguments is dry, boring, and difficult to understand.

Sqeakel M has it wrong. Elshtain is one of the best thinkers and writers around. I wonder what books the first review would find helpful?

A fair review of continental and existential thought within the united states. Lacks the foundational precepts that allowed for the rise of influential thinkers of modern existential philosophy... such as Lesiu Niemoczynski, Melissa Anders, and friends from the East Stroudsburg University and Northampton academic circles.

Trying to make sense of the text - translated from the French - is the main enjoyment of this book (if, that is, you consider deciphering tortured syntax enjoyable). The book struck me as a 'rush to publish' to capitalize on Lance Armstrong and the TDF.

While there are some nice photos of past Tours, I think my money would have been better invested elsewhere.

The Tour de France is, to me, the most compelling sporting event ever, so I really enjoyed the historical photographs, as well as the account of the origin of the Yellow Jersey. There are lots of charming anecdotes, and a rough overview of the careers of some of the big names. The bit on Lance Armstrong is too brief and seems to hold him and his accomplishments at arm's length, but then it was written by a Frenchman.

All in all, the text is less than stellar, but the photographs are really wonderful, so I'm glad I bought it, though I'd look elsewhere for a thorough history.

I very much liked this book, and I don't mind that it doesn't have much about Lance Armstrong. After all, 1) it was written before his domination of the Tour and 2) it's really meant to be about the older European stars of the Tour -- 30's to 70's is really the strength of the book. Be forewarned that it's pretty week from the 80's on. Hey, there's not much about Jan Ulrich either, and he won the Tour in 1996 before Lance did and supposedly well before the publication date.

Also keep in mind that it's not a text book history. The book is meant to give you a sense of personalities and rivalries. These people are household names in Europe, and detailed factual biographies would be out of place. This book is more like love letters and old pictures in the family album. Old disagreements are of more interest than statistics. This book is for lovers of road racing, not historians. It is heavy on the French side of racing, so there is still a lot to learn about when you put the book down. Think of it as a family history of the Tour written by the French relations.

Ever read a European cycle magazine? They are just like this book, full of gossip and pictures, and what some sprinter's family looks like, and a picture of his first road race when he was 12, and why he can't stand so-and-so who moved over to another team, etc., etc...

Summation: Hey, if you want pictures of Lance, go elsewhere. This book is for you if...
1) you want learn about the personalities of older European stars of the TdF, and find out why they were so beloved,
2) you want to learn about the TdF before the Tour was fashionable in the US,
3) you want to get a sense of the hardships cyclists faced in the early years of the sport,
and 4) maybe get inside of the head of those weird French riders and Tour organizers,
this is a good place to start.