How to be Married
How to be Married

Author: Jo Piazza

Publisher: Harmony

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0451495551

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At age thirty-four, Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long, Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone's partner -- all the time? Journalist and author Jo Piazza writes a memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony. A travel editor constantly on the move, Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means. Throughout this personal narrative, she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen, French ladies who lunch, Orthodox Jewish moms, Swedish stay-at-home dads, polygamous warriors, and Dutch prostitutes. How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of a couple. When life throws more at them than they ever expected -- a terrifying health diagnosis, sick parents to care for, unemployment -- they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times.

Our Oldest Enemy
Our Oldest Enemy

Author: John J. Miller

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0307419185

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Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité? Or just plain gall? In this provocative and brilliantly researched history of how the French have dealt with the United States, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky demonstrate that the cherished idea of French friendship has little basis in reality. Despite the myth of the “sister republics,” the French have always been our rivals, and have harmed and obstructed our interests more often than not. This history of French hostility goes back to 1704, when a group of French and Indians massacred American settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The authors also debunk the myth of French aid during the Revolution: contrary to popular notions, the French did not enter the war until very late and were mainly interested in hurting their rivals, the British. After the war, the French continued to see themselves as major players in the Western hemisphere and shaped their policies to limit the growth and power of the new nation. The notorious XYZ affair, involving French efforts to undermine the government of George Washington, led to an undeclared naval war with France in 1798. During the Civil War, the French supported the Confederacy and installed a puppet emperor in Mexico. In the twentieth century, Americans clashed with the French repreatedly. The French victory over President Wilson at Versailles imposed a short-sighted and punitive settlement on Germany that paved the way for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. During World War II, Vichy French troops killed hundreds of American soldiers in North Africa, and diehard French fascist units fought against the Allies in the rubble of Berlin. During the Cold War, Charles DeGaulle yanked France out of NATO and obstructed our efforts to roll back Soviet expansion. The legacy of French imperial power has been no less disastrous. The French left Haiti in a shambles, got us into Vietnam, and educated many of the world’s worst tyrants at their elite universities, including Pol Pot, the genocidal Cambodian dictator. The fascist Baath regimes in Iraq and Syria are another legacy of failed French colonialism. Americans have been particularly irritated by French cultural arrogance—their crusades against American movies, McDonalds, Disney, and the exclusion of American words from their language have always rubbed us the wrong way. This irritation has now blossomed into outrage. Our Oldest Enemy shows why that outrage is justified.

French Foreign Policy since 1945
French Foreign Policy since 1945

Author: Frédéric Bozo

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1785332775

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When Charles de Gaulle declared that “it is because we are no longer a great power that we need a grand policy,” he neatly summarized France’s predicament on the world scene. In this compact and engaging history, author Frédéric Bozo deftly recounts France’s efforts to reconcile its proud history and global ambitions with a realistic appraisal of its capabilities, from the aftermath of World War II to the present. He provides insightful analysis of the nation’s triumphs and setbacks through the years of decolonization, Cold War maneuvering, and European unification, as well as the more contemporary challenges posed by an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world.

French Foreign Policy in a Changing World
French Foreign Policy in a Changing World

Author: Pernille Rieker

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-18

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 3319552694

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This book investigates how modern French foreign policy is practiced. France finds its traditional power status challenged by internal as well as external developments. Internally, it faces societal challenges related to unemployment, integration, social exclusion, Islamist terrorism and the rise of populism. Externally, its status is challenged by global and regional developments – including the financial crises, competition from emerging states, EU enlargement and a more powerful Germany. While the French recognise that they no longer have great-power economic or military power capacities, the conviction of the universal value of French civilization and culture remains strong. As this book argues, for France to be able to punch above its weight in international politics, it must effectively promote the value of ‘French universalism’ and culture. This study investigates how this is reflected in modern French foreign policy by examining foreign policy practices towards selected regions/countries and in relation to external and internal security. Written by a senior researcher specializing in French and EU foreign and security policy, this book will be an invaluable resource for practitioners of foreign policy and students of French politics, international relations and European studies.

The Bettencourt Affair
The Bettencourt Affair

Author: Tom Sancton

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 110198449X

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An NPR Best Book of 2017 Heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At ninety-four, she was embroiled in what has been called the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families, set in the most romantic city—and involving the most glamorous industry—in the world. The Bettencourt Affair started as a family drama but quickly became a massive scandal, uncovering L’Oréal’s shadowy corporate history and buried World War II secrets. From the Right Bank mansions to the Left Bank artist havens; and from the Bettencourts’ servant quarters to the office of President Nicolas Sarkozy; all of Paris was shaken by the blockbuster case, the shocking reversals, and the surprising final victim. It all began when Liliane met François-Marie Banier, an artist and photographer who was, in his youth, the toast of Paris and a protégé of Salvador Dalí. Over the next two decades, Banier was given hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, cash, and insurance policies by Liliane. What, exactly, was their relationship? It wasn’t clear, least of all to Liliane’s daughter and only child, Françoise, who became suspicious of Banier’s motives and filed a lawsuit against him. But Banier has a far different story to tell... The Bettencourt Affair is part courtroom drama; part upstairs-downstairs tale; and part characterdriven story of a complex, fascinating family and the intruder who nearly tore it apart.

The Radiance of France, new edition
The Radiance of France, new edition

Author: Gabrielle Hecht

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2009-07-31

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0262266172

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How it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. In the aftermath of World War II, as France sought a distinctive role for itself in the modern, postcolonial world, the nation and its leaders enthusiastically embraced large technological projects in general and nuclear power in particular. The Radiance of France asks how it happened that technological prowess and national glory (or “radiance,” which also means “radiation” in French) became synonymous in France as nowhere else. To answer this question, Gabrielle Hecht has forged an innovative combination of technology studies and cultural and political history in a book that, as Michel Callon writes in the new foreword to this edition, “not only sheds new light on the role of technology in the construction of national identities” but is also “a seminal contribution to the history of contemporary France.” Proposing the concept of technopolitical regime as a way to analyze the social, political, cultural, and technological dynamics among engineering elites, unionized workers, and rural communities, Hecht shows how the history of France's first generation of nuclear reactors is also a history of the multiple meanings of nationalism, from the postwar period (and France's desire for post-Vichy redemption) to 1969 and the adoption of a “Frenchified” American design. This paperback edition of Hecht's groundbreaking book includes both Callon's foreword and an afterword by the author in which she brings the story up to date, and reflects on such recent developments as the 2007 French presidential election, the promotion of nuclear power as the solution to climate change, and France's aggressive exporting of nuclear technology.