This book was a textbook in preparation for a study abroad trip to France. In many ways I could relate to the author. In particular, I too lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly when I was young. I too (for different reasons) ended up living in France, learning French, and falling hopelessly in love with it (as well as the people and many aspects of the culture; however, I'm a linguist at heart). Because of this, much of what she wrote about her life experiences, her love of and need for French, rang true to me. I was profoundly grateful to her for giving me the words and concepts necessary to understand myself and the world around me better. On the other hand, I found her intellectual approach to life difficult to handle. I appreciate the intellectual side of life, but there's a point when it becomes too excessive and all-controlling. At times I felt she slipped over into this too much. For example, her experiences in French graduate work convinced me almost single-handedly NOT to study French after my bachelor's degree. All in all, I would recommend this book to someone who is already in love with France, French, and the French. Otherwise it may come across as overly intellectual and of little interest.

Alice Kaplan's autobiography provides some insightful data into the factors involved in second-language acquisition. Internal factors such as motivation and external factors such as the environment seem to have an important role within the process of acquiring the target language. Further, Kaplan's story reveals a methodology of instruction that she was exposed to as a child. We then are able to see the success of this approach to language teaching and able to compare it to a methodology that she incorporates later in life when she begins to teach French herself.

The role of motivation appears to play a significant role in Kaplan's acquisition of French. Yet an important question is raised by Lightbown and Spada, "...are learners more highly motivated because they are successful, or are they successful because they are highly motivated?" Kaplan's first years with French begin in the fifth grade where she seems more interested in playing pranks than schoolwork. Four years later the opportunity to study in Switzerland arises and it seems likely that the excitement that accompanied the move was what initially sparked her interest and consequential motivation in studying French.

Once in Switzerland, Kaplan seems almost obsessive in her studies, substituting physical nourishment for a philological diet, "I grew thinner and thinner. I ate French." This intense desire to learn French seems to stem from her search for a new identity. The loss of her father seems to have left a void, which she fills through her study of French. She compares herself to her past, "At home I was the worst in sports; here, miraculously, I was good. It felt like my life had been given to me to start over."3 It is this new life and new identity that fuels her desire to absorb her target language.

The environment in which language acquisition takes place is, in my estimation, probably the most influential factor in successful learning and retaining of the target language. The obvious benefit is the amount of time the native environment provides the learner to use the language. Numerous other factors involved in the process of acquiring a second language seem to be contingent upon the environment in which those factors are operating. For instance, motivation has been considered a factor that plays a role in learning a second language. From my experience, I was much more motivated learning Polish in its natural environment rather than being limited to the classroom setting three hours a week. In addition to the excitement of being abroad in a foreign country, I was always eager to be able to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom through real world experience. The natural environment seems to make the acquisition of a second language practical, rather than a theoretical knowledge used only in an academic setting.

Further, being immersed in the natural environment also seems to decrease one's inhibition with the target language. When Kaplan arrives in Switzerland, she soon realizes that French is required in everyday functions. In the classroom one might be more self-conscious, whereas in the environment, one's concern is likely more on using the language to achieve a practical goal. This appears to be an important point given the effect inhibition has on acquisition, "In a series of studies, Alexander Guiora and his colleagues found support for the claim that inhibition is a negative force, at least for second language pronunciation performance."

Kaplan's early years of study in Switzerland had heavy emphasis on dictation and memorization. This was the typical approach to language instruction; to teach it as you would any other subject. It is this approach that Kaplan excelled in, "Don't be original, learn from a ready-made reality ready-to-hand." One interesting approach that she spent a year with while a student in Switzerland was the lecon de choses; a method in which the student draws objects and then labels them. This method appeals to me because it incorporates other motor and cognitive skills that may lead one to acquire lexical items unconsciously. Further, this approach seems a lot more enjoyable than rote memorization and thus may increase the student's motivation with the language while decreasing boredom and consequential discouragement, "Dictation can ruin a child's relationship to language."

Once Kaplan becomes a language instructor she relies upon the Carpretz method, a tradition that fully immerses the student and then forces them to "sink or swim". The Carpretz method incorporates the visual stimulation of an on-going television sitcom in the target language. English is not spoken and there are no exercises in translation. Grammar and vocabulary are integrated into the plot of the story. "The Carpretz method reproduces the conditions by which a student on her junior year abroad might learn French language and culture..." Kaplan asserts that this method is very successful in the classroom and that her extroverted students did so well that it frightened her.

Kaplan's text was especially beneficial in its practicality. She did not leave us to indirectly derive various factors in her language study and then speculate about their effectiveness. But rather, she went into detail about the instructional methodology of her own study of French, as well as the methods she incorporated in her own classrooms. As she says, "...language teachers are always in search of the full proof method that will work for any living language and will make people perfectly at home in their acquired tongue." This book is definitely appropriate for those that wish to increase their effectiveness in language instruction, as well as those that simply wish to have a better understanding of the process behind second-language acquisition.

I wish I had started this book sooner. I quickly put it ahead of everthing else I was doing, including lesson plans for my Spanish classes. Kaplan writes very convincingly and vividly about living in France and Switzerland while learning French. She has a family story to tell and she weaves in so many important elements that create an emotional ending. I relived so many of my own experiences living and learning Spanish while I read her stories. She helped me put lots of memories into some more simpler order that had escaped me for years. Merci.

This is an unusual book on France's purge of its collaborators during the German occupation. By focussing on novelist and critic Robert Brasillach, Alice Kaplan tells us as much about literature as about politics. By the standards of today, Brasillach's propagandist work is naive. His glorification of the Reich, for example in Je Suis Partout of which he was editor in chief until 1943, is hopelessly romantic (even managing to quote Virgil in support) and bore no relationship to the experiences of ordinary French people living under the occupation. He seems to have been part of a pro nazi, elite homosexual coterie who found in fascism an outlet for their love of uniforms and male bonding. Kaplan has explored in depth the trial records and notes that Brasillach's insistence on rambling on for days ensured his death sentence. He would have done better to have remained silent. It is argued that he has become a martyr for the extreme right in French politics, but this thesis not really stretched beyond references to John Marie Le Pen's admiration. One is left with the feeling that Brasillach, like Vidkun Quisling in another context, left a weaker legacy than he thought he would. The complete lack of photographs, apart from a blowup on the dust jacket, gives the impression this book will largely have a specialist readership.

Alice Kaplan's new book "The Collaborator" is a major work of literary and cultural criticism. In her investigation of the writings and the trial for treason of French fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach, Kaplan combines erudition with a sensitivity to the importance of writing and literature in modern France. The purge of 1944-1947 was a unique moment in French history: for the first time since the Revolution a group of writers was tried for having jeopardized the interests of the nation. The Brasillach case was exemplary. At the heart of Kaplan's book is not so much the story of the life and times of Robert Brasillach as the question of what it means when a nation decides to condemn one of its writers for treason. The great merit of "The Collaborator" is that Kaplan answers this question by looking in detail at the documents from the period. In her research she reads and analyzes Brasillach's articles in the collaborationist press, in particular those that appeared in the notorious and antisemitic weekly, "Je Suis Partout." She deftly guides the reader through the transcript of Brasillach's trial. In one of the most original parts of the book she identifies the four jurors at Brasillach's trial, describing in detail their personal history, their politics and their role in the Liberation of France. She is one of the few scholars to have looked at the Brasillach pardon file, submitted to de Gaulle in February 1945, and her conclusions about de Gaulle's reactions to the file are startling. Throughout, Kaplan is unfailingly honest about her discoveries and the parts of the trial that remain a mystery. Brasillach was a complex character who seems to have made up in racist diatribe what he lacked in literary skill. Kaplan's point is not to give us a psychobiography of the writer. Rather "The Collaborator" is a sober and compelling reflection on literature and the memory of World War II today.

Brasillach was a political (anti-semitic, racist) commentator and novelist in France before and during WWII.
As we can read in his memoirs, he was intellectually seduced by the racist and nationalistic work of Charles Maurras (L'Action Française). He had probably homosexual tendencies.
After the war, he was condemned (3 against 1) for high treason and executed.
For me, the author proves convincingly that the trial was excessive and unfair - the Liberation courts were essential Vichy courts! Brasillach was guilty for his writing, but should not have been shot. There was no strict cause-effect relationship between Brasillach's words and the murders and deportations that did take place in France.
But I agree also with the author that with this trial there was much more at stake: free speech, the capacity of language to do real evil, the accountability of writers and intellectuals. It was a warning by the political power elite at that moment.

Good portraits of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir.

A model study. Nearly every sentence in this book is supported by a reference.
It is a signing on the wall that this book was written by an American. The ghosts and demons of WWII are still not dead in Europe.