Unlike Dickens' tuburcular heroines, Denise, who indeed suffers what Zola called "poverty in a black silk dress," is plucky, and she ultimately breaks the glass ceiling in her own gentle way. She encounters sexual harassment and somehow triumphs. She is a modern woman, perhaps European literature's first truly modern heroine ever.

This book is one of the best ever written, bar none, and it is light years ahead of its time.

Wonderfull portrayal of the life within one of the first big department store. Great insite on the mid 19th century society in Paris. Zola's best work.

Au Bonheur des Dames is the story of an orphaned young girl Denise. She moves to Paris with her younger siblings to live with her uncle and aunt and immediately is enthralled with the lights and the beauty of the city. She begins work in the store Au Bonheur des Dames and falls in love with its propriator. The novel is a love story but also examines the perpetual battle between the old and the new ways of living. The store Au Bonheur des Dames sells a variety of products while the store of Denise's family is simply a clothing store. Zola's novel is before its time. It accurately describes a social issue of today, the bigger commercial store taking over the small, personalized store.

Wow! This is definetely a five star book and I highly recommend it!! It is filled with lots of great information and tools to help teams move through problem areas and perform at peak levels. It is easy to read and understand, and the information is immediately transferable to real life situations. Great suggestions on how to handle problem situations - especially the Problem Matrix which lists common team/group problems and tools to help you work through them. At one time or another I have seen all 17 problems listed in the matrix. The tools in the book which help you work through and overcome these problems are all practical and useful!

interesting, lively, and very readable treatment on the topic of leadership. Like In Search of Excellence, the material has a curiously inspirational quality which is particularly compelling. This book should be essential reading for those in positions of leadership and those aspiring to be - a welcome, well founded book on the topic.

and leaders. It captures those behaviors that are so important, but are often forgotten in the rush of working together. Light Bulbs for Leaders isolates the behaviors so that leaders and teams can use them as needed. It is a practical and useful tool. I keep it in my briefcase and refer to it often.

Every now and the you read a book that is so lovely, that you find yourself talking about to everyone you meet, literature lover or not.
This one of those books. It has been standing on my bookshelves for 20 years! By coincidence I picked it up, not knowing whether I wanted to read a narrative of a childhood or not (I don't fancy them much). But as soon as I started reading it I was captivated.
I read it in Swedish. Had I not known that the translator, Bengt Söderbergh is a fine novelists, who has lived in France for most part of his life, I would have thought book badly translated, until I got into this child way if speaking. It is hilarious, he makes a lot of mistakes resulting in an exciting and lively language.
The novel colourfully depicts life among the poor, unemployed, hookers, pimps in Belleville in Paris.
The book is full of odd characters, very often a lot of fun and in the end, very sad and moving.
I do recommend it!

This beautiful book is one of the best books I had ever read! Through the eyes of an 8-year-old orphan Arab child, who lives unlegaly in a jewish formel prostitutes house, we learn about life, love and all the other things that realy matter. The decision of Ajar to state such a young child in this harsh life causes enormous emotional conflicts among the reading audience, but with this difficulty comes a great anount of pure innocence. warmly recommended!

Rarely does one still encounter a masterpiece that shakes his world and makes him add a new shade of emotion to the range he already had within him. This book is such a work of art. Through the story of the love and compation of a little 8 year old Arab orphan boy to the old Jewish prostitute, a survivor of the Holocaust, who raises him, we hear again the delicate music of the human spirit, of tenderness and compation, of delicate human ties and daily hardships. Run to the bookstores and get this book. Read it and lend it to all you friends till all the pages are completely worn out, and you will never have spent your time and money more wisely.

Sit back and enjoy the ride. From start to finish, this is a fascinating and at times horrfying book.

The Beast In Man was first published in 1890 and is remarkable for its depiction of a world of harsh brutality and the startling frankness of its descriptions of sexual passion.

If ever a book could be described as being ahead of its time, then this is it. Hard-hitting, fast paced, tragic, brutal, erotic and tear jerking, this book has it all.

The plot is exceptional with characters that leap off the page and allow you, the reader, to fully experience their traumatic lives in 19th century France.

All-in-all a fantastic book, written by a true genius who has undoubtedly influenced many of today's most successful scribes.

One of Zola's best and most famous works. There is something strangely fascinating about a murder where the killer escapes detection and punishment only to receive terminal treatment from another, totally unexpected source. When this happens twice in the same book, along with some tales of child abuse, a high-level cover-up, a sabotage attempt on a train in which virtually everyone is killed in the carnage except the persons targeted, a suicide, plus some assorted couplings outside of the marshalling yards, things get really interesting. What makes people commit such crimes? Here Zola really shows his skill in explaining his characters' motives and the dark, primeval forces that drive them. A pulsating, chilling story from beginning to end, full of unexpected twists, starting with the creation of a previously unknown member of the Macquart family as the novel's main character. Highly recommended for long train or air journeys.

In this well-written and important book, Hilbert demonstrates how key themes in classical social theory were lost or 'inverted' by Talcott Parsons. Hilbert goes on to show how Garfinkel's 'Studies in Ethnomethodology' (1967), and related work by other early ethnomethodologists generated a body of knowledge regarding actual social practices that stood Parsons on his head, thereby unintentionally 'recovering' some of the key insights lost to American Sociology through Parson's interpretation of Durkheim and Weber. A thought-provoking book whose insights can fuel further empirical work explicating the actual processes of the social world.

In this well-written and important book, Hilbert demonstrates how key themes in classical social theory were lost or 'inverted' by Talcott Parsons. Hilbert goes on to show how Garfinkel's 'Studies in Ethnomethodology' (1967), and related work by other early ethnomethodologists generated a body of knowledge regarding actual social practices that stood Parsons on his head, thereby unintentionally 'recovering' some of the key insights lost to American Sociology through Parson's interpretation of Durkheim and Weber. A thought-provoking book whose insights can fuel further empirical work explicating the actual processes of the social world.

I watched the CBC miniseries and was thrilled by the narrative. The book is equally worthy of praise; a wonderful, quiet read. I would almost dare to call it haunting. Certainly worth reading.

You know a good story when it has the capacity to break your heart. Cousture leaves the reader hungry and pleasantly fulfilled at the same time. A strange paradox that makes for a fabulous read.

At 16 Emile leaves her family in Saint-Tite to teach at a rural, one room school house. The story may seem tired and banal, but Cousture presents it with rich emotion and complexities. A loveable student with a crush, Ovile Provost grows up to be a lover, and a man that moves in and out of Emile's life. Ovile is a character that frustrates, challenges and induces a stubborn forgiveness every time he returns.

The reader can feel the heavy presence of winter, the fluid passage of time.

The reader discovers together with Stefan Zweig the poetic force and the essential human and metaphysical messages of Verhaeren's work.
Zweig's analysis is perspicacious and profound, written in an enthralling style.

Verhaeren sees art as a victory on the human destiny of suffering and his art as a witness of that victory.
He is the first enthusiastic bard and realistic painter of the modern world: the emergence of the democracy of the big cities, the masses, the mines, the struggle between the industry (the progressives, the socialists) and the peasantry (the conservatives, the Catholics), the emigration, the financial crises, the scientific discoveries.
Behind this realism lay Verhaeren's philosophical conceptions and aspirations: his limitless love for a physically and metaphysically free humanity, free from hazard and obscure religions; the emancipation of mankind through the work of scientists and their scientific discoveries.
Verhaeren is a pantheist, a participating part of nature and the human community. He is the poet of an emerging Europe as a big brotherhood.

It is horrendously difficult to write an inspiring book about a poet and his work and to present an analysis that arouses the interest of the reader. But this work reads like a thriller. It should be read by all biographers in order to learn how to keep their readers in their spell. I believe every poet would like to have a biographer like Zweig.
Not to be missed.

I'm working at the University, here in Mexico, over some of the poets that have writen their feelings using the industrialisation words. One of them is Emile Verhaeren. I'd like to know if there is an English or an American poet writing before 1900 this kind of words. If you sell the books, please, let me know

Written in 1891, Émile Zola's classic The Debacle, provides a ground level interpretation of what it is like see one's homeland suffer military defeat, foreign occupation and internal revolution. The Debacle covers the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 from the French viewpoint. Indeed, Zola's novel is strikingly divergent from most late-19th Century European views of warfare, which saw conflict through the prism of personal glory and national aggrandizement. This is an exceedingly grim novel, without the slightest glimmer of hope for any of the characters. Zola depicts war in all its brutal fury, including battle, arson, murder, looting, children abandoned, treachery, and starvation. Indeed, the four horsemen of the apocalypse always seem close at hand in The Debacle, and usually preceded by large doses of despair and anguish.

The Debacle consists of three sections: "the trap," which covers the frontier battles between 6-30 August 1879; "the disaster," which covers the Battle of Sedan on 1-2 September 1870; and "the aftermath," which covers the period September 1870 - May 1871. Only inadequate maps and a tendency to overuse British colloquial expressions mar the Penguin edition of Zola's classic.

The main military characters in the novel are part of a company in the 106th Infantry Regiment/2nd Division/7th Corps in Alsace. Jean represents "the reasonable, solid, peasant part" of France, while Maurice represents "the silly, crazy part which had been spoilt by the Empire, unhinged by dreams and debauches." Most of the enlisted troops are presented as mercurial - brave, hard working and stoic one moment, or lazy, undisciplined and complaining the next. Certainly Zola sees the poor discipline of French troops, who discard weapons and equipment on marches, as evidence that the French Army had declined in quality from the legendary Grande Armée. The reputation of the French army of 1870 was based on a legend that it could no longer live up to, and this army marched to Sedan, "like a herd of cattle lashed by the whip of fate."

French officers, particularly at the company level were actually quite good, most of whom had risen through the ranks. Zola depicts Lieutenant Rochas, a stalwart veteran of 27 years, as typical of "the legendary French trooper going through the world between his girl on one side and a bottle of good wine on the other, conquering the world singing ribald choruses." French officers are depicted as ignorant but brave, fed on the legends of Napoleonic military invincibility. As the Battle of Sedan enters its final moments, Rochas stands, "flabbergasted and wild-eyed, having understood nothing so far about the campaign, he felt himself being enveloped and carried away by some superior force he could not resist anymore, even though he went on with his obstinate cry - Courage lads, victory is just around the corner." Even Captain Beaudoin, a bit of a fop, is able to display stoic bravery as his leg is amputated. Colonel de Vineuil, the regimental commander, is brave and imperturbable but little else. Higher level commanders are portrayed as more interested in their own comfort and careers than the welfare of the troops or the nation.

There is certainly no glory in Zola's depiction of war. The battle for Bazeilles is particularly grim, and Zola has a knack for phrases like, "destruction was now completing its work, and nothing was left but a charnel house of scattered limbs and smoking ruins." It was also unusual for a 19th Century war novel to depict what happened to casualties and Major Bouroche's aid station in Sedan is painted in the starkest, bloodstained terms. Most conventional histories of the war shift to the Siege of Paris after the surrender at Sedan, failing to note what happened to the 80,000 French prisoners of war. Zola gives the reader a vivid depiction of the suffering of these troops who were crammed into a small, disease-infested area, with no food for over a week.

Zola sees the debacle as a crime - "the murder of a nation." - with Emperor Napoleon III merely awaiting fate. Who was responsible for the crime? Through the civilian Delaherche, the capitalist, Zola points to opposition politicians in the legislature for failing to provide enough funds for military preparedness. At the grunt level, the troops blame their division and corps commanders - "the whole absence of any plan or energetic leadership were precipitating the disaster." Zola also points to the collapse of the French logistic system early in the war, which left troops unfed and short of ammunition, as attributable to shoddy staff work and a spastic command and control system. After the first defeats on the frontier, pessimism rapidly replaces blind optimism in the French ranks and a sense of the inevitability of defeat develops. Maurice concludes that, "we were bound to be beaten on account of causes the inevitable results of which were plain for all to see, the collision of unintelligent bravery with superior numbers and cool method."

Are there lessons for modern readers in Zola's 112-year old novel? Certainly an obvious point that Zola hammers home through his characters is that national security should be based on realistic assessments of one's own strengths and weaknesses, and not based merely on past reputations. While the French military was given the physical tools for modern war - the chassepot rifle and the mitrailleuse - the upper leadership did not possess the intellectual or emotional stamina for modern warfare. Zola also makes points about the nuts and bolts of foreign military occupation and military government that are just as relevant today in Baghdad as they were in Sedan. Finally, while Zola waffles on whether or not war is a "necessary evil," he certainly makes the point that given its inherently high cost in human suffering that it should only be embarked upon for reasons of national survival, and not merely to satisfy the whims of an opportunistic politician.

War has served as the back drop of many literary masterpieces: The Illiad, War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22. Zola's "La Debacle," set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, is every bit as good as these classics. Yet, somehow, this piece seems to have been dropped from the list of war novel classics.

Zola spent 20 years researching the conflict in great detail and his novel is as faithful to historical fact as any ever written. Few military defeats have been as sudden, unanticipated, complete and humiliating as the French collapse in 1870. Zola captures the demoralizing effect that the vertiginous orders and counter-orders had on the French troops in the early phases of the war. A complete lack of planning and mobilization plans, along with inefficient communications and intelligence services, led to scattered units marching aimlessly in search of the enemy without food or shelter and without any general plan of operations. The French were truly defeated before ever making contact with the Prussians. La Debacle is as a good an illustration of the "fog of war" as any I've read.

French novelist and critic, the founder of naturalist movement in literature. As a political journalist Zola did not hide his antipathy toward the French Emperor Napoleon II and his Second Empire, his works in which Zola scandalised the drawing rooms of the day with detailed exposures of the vast exploitation underpinning the glitter of France.

Zola Make John a 25 years old, brilliant, smooth talking investment banker discovers that his life is not as wonderful as it seemed. He is framed into an illegal enterprise by his vicious ex-girlfriend. Problems begin to appear very quickly and friends turn away almost instantly. John finds that his paradise turned into a debacle. Yet, there is a happy end to this crazy adventure. Zola keeps the reader in suspense, every next page hides some surprise, and there is a lot of great humor too! For the action-lovers it is a MUST!!!

The rise of department store culture in late 19th century Paris is the subject of this wonderful novel. It's quintessential Zola, in that the book is a top-notch combination of realistic writing and soap opera. Like other classics by Zola - "L'Assomoir," "Germinal" - "The Ladies Paradise" uses a somewhat overheated storyline to comment on social change and how a rapacious capitalism changed the lives of everyone it touched. The novel is especially poignant in its depiction of small, family-owned businesses which are eventually destroyed by the kind of modern marketing techniques that created the department store. A real page-turner, "The Ladies Paradise" works as both exceptional trash novel and social critique. Zola is a real genius and this, one of his more obscure works, is also one of his best.

"The Ladies Paradise" or "Au Bonheur des Dames" is the continuation of Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. The series' purpose, according to Zola, is to study how environment effects the character of one family line. Three "environments" have appeared in Zola's work: the first is the idyllic countryside, the second is the harsh countryside, and the third is Paris--the city. "Au Bonheur des Dames" is situated in the third of the "environments", Paris.

From his previous works, Paris is already known for its potential as a corruptionist of morality and goodness. Thus, the heroine already is facing an insurmountable task of remaining adverse to Paris' degradation of moral values. She is the ultimate martyr: her sacrifices to her younger brothers seem endless. She scrapes money together to have the youngest in a boarding house for children, and always manage to find money (even in desperate times)to give to the other spendthrift brother. All of these sacrifices she did out of love.

With such heart and of such noble spirit, she enters Paris. She is struck by the first sight she sees in Paris. A gigantic structure has swallowed an entire block of old and fading smaller stores. She is astounded, awed, and fascinated by it. Her loyalty is divided between her Uncle's small clothier and her fascination and desire to work in the store.

"Au Bonheur des Dames" has two stories: (1) the spread of the popularity of department stores and the death of smaller family owned stores in "modern" Paris, and (2) the noble heroine. Will the heroine be crushed by Paris and swallowed up by the department store? Will her nobler spirit defeat all the odds that have been predestined to be against her?

The most surprising event I find was that I did not have to answer with pessimism about "Au Bonheur des Dames". The usual gloom and sense of helplessness and resignation of being human did not reverberate in this novel. Yes, the department thrives and therefore consumed all the "moms and pops" stores along its path, but our heroine conquers that depraved city Paris with her courage, innocence, and nobility.

What a truly remarkable book, as all of Zola's magnificent work. I find this book different from any of the series, because there is more than a sense of hope for humanity in our struggle against corruption, against technological advancement, and our own weakness of spirit.

With his Rougon-Macquart series, Emile Zola established the family saga. He put into naturalistic prose and photographic narrative the tales of a family and how their lives are affected by their surroundings. In L'Assomoir, he focused on the lives of the Provencals, those who live in the French countryside, whose lives may appear peaceful and orderly but might not be at a closer look. In Nana, he wrote about the world of the courtesan or high class prostitute operating in the beauty and sex-obscessed French culture of Paris. In "Au Bonheur Des Dames" (The Lady's Paradise) Zola exposes the capitalism and consumer culture of fashion, as expressed in the sales at the department stores.

It was the time of Karl Marx, a time when conservative elements came into conflict with those of individual expression and equal rights. Previously, Emile Zola's novels were bleak, Dickensian and depressing, making a cynical social commentary that progress and idealism is stifled under staunch older generations of Republican power (in this case the French Second Empire under Louis Napoleon III). He conveyed so much pain and suffering in "Germinal" about the coal mine workers in rural France. Like John Steinbeck of the 19th century, Emile Zola immersed himself in what he wrote, treating people as humanly real as possible, touching a chord to so many for his unabashed truths.

In The Ladies Paradise (the title refers to the name of the high class department store in downtown Paris), Zola portrays the fetish and profitable business of women's fashion. Octave Mouret, who at fist comes off as a money-loving, greedy, corporate seducer learns the value of progress and the rights of the individual. Where as he had always dominated women, manipulating them to buy his endless carrousel of hats, silks, gowns and shoes, he cannot win the affections of the newcomer sales girls Denise.

Denis eyes become our eyes as we see into the sexist world of consumer capitalism. Even today, this holds true. Women are encouraged, enforced and expected to be beautiful and attractive, with 0 size dresses, with fashionable tastes and so forth. Those who cannot meet society's self-imposed ideals of beauty crack under the pressure, becoming anorexic, anxious and sick. Super models, department stores, fashion magazines and the latest trends to look like Britney Spears (and behave just as shallow and air-headed) is the way to happiness they say. Emile Zola completely transports you to Paris of the 1870's and 1880's a time when the world seemed to be losing its better values. Is it still losing its values ? Only through advocating women's rights, individual expression, equality, and less stifling elements in society are we truly to be happy.

Durkheim sometimes gets a bad rap for his politics, but this is a good book that laid the foundations for much of the sociological work that has followed it. Using the case study example of suicide rates, Durkheim undertakes to show that social structure has a profound and powerful influence on almost everything that individuals do. While the translation is sometimes awkward, Durkheim's work is impressive in its methods, ambitions, and execution. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the hstory of sociology or just the power of social structure.

Emile Durkheim's classic work tells us more than just details about suicide. Studying a powerfully individual phenomenon from a sociological perspective was, in its own right, an impressive undertaking. But what interests me more for sociology of media is the way Durkheim handled statistics. In the first chapter, he gives a series of examples that illustrate the danger in placing too much unexamined value in numerical data. He shows first that married people commit suicide more than singles, but then notes that single people include children who are unlikely to commit suicide. Therefore this data does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship between marriage and suicide. He adjusts the data, taking only people of marriage age and computes the data again. This time, single people commit suicide more than married people. However, Durkheim then notes that single people will automatically include a larger portion of mentally or physically defunct people. He therefore concludes that there is not sufficient data to make a conclusion about a causal relationship between suicide and marital status. This is really little more than mental exercise, but it is a critical one for any one employing survey methods and statistical analysis. The researcher must be vigilant in analyzing data to ensure avoiding errors in logic.
Durkheim's study in sociology contributes much more than this detail to the social sciences, but for my purposes of analyzing the sociology of media, this is the most critical point.

Emile Durkheim is called a Father of Sociology, and rightly so. He was the first man to work on all of the problems and issues, unresolved by other known sciences at the time ( in 19-century), to combine many of the already known scientific methods in one, and to call it sociology. Surely, there were other theorists, his contemporaries, who were starting to wander in the same direction at the same time with Durkheim, but he was the one, who put his own and other people's theories to practice. That is what "Suicide" is all about: gathering data and putting it to test with the theory (suicide, being the subject of the study in this case, of course). The best part about Durkheim's work presented in "Suicide" is that it is still an incredibly potent and groundbreaking manuscript. One, who reads it today, can't help but notice that human nature and human problems have largely remained the same: they are universal and ageless and they still need to be studied by competent sociologists.