Publié à l'occasion de l' exposition "Le rêve de la raison, l'observatoire astronomique de Nice", présentée en 2005 à Nice puis à Marseille sur les bâtiments conçus et réalisés sur la Côte d'Azur et la Riviera italienne par les architectes Charles Garnier ou Gustave Eiffel.
David Harvie tells the story of Gustave Eiffel and of the conception, and controversial construction of the tower that bears his name, perhaps the most famous tall building in the world.
A history of the Eiffel Tower and the civil engineer/architect who built it. This work also covers the tower's influence on society and its impact on architecture, engineering, the arts, etc.
The narrow strip of Mediterranean coastline that retches from the port of Toulon to the Italian border is an area rich in contrasts. In the 1920s and 1930s it was the scene of a multitude of unique and varied architectural endeavors. Palaces and casinos, prestigious public buildings and innumerable villas nestled in the pine-clad hills combine with a dialectic of light and shadow to create a vista of unparalleled beauty.
Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce experiences on previous unimaginable scale. Feeling Lucky, is a “making of story,” about cities which acquired a strange and captivating allure of mystery around them. It is more than a mere descriptive account, however. Combining urban history, the history of consumption, and sociological approaches it presents a compelling comparative history of Monte Carlo and the Las Vegas Strip between the 1860s and 1970s. Paul Franke takes the reader on a journey from arriving at the cities, through the carefully planned urban environments and into the famous casinos. The analysis follows the paths contemporary gamblers would have taken, right to the gambling tables and to the shifting gambling practices across a century. Franke shows that casino entrepreneurs succeeded in producing and selling gambling experiences by controlling spaces, adapt leisure practices and appeal to specific markets. Gamblers on the other hand regarded Monte Carlo and Las Vegas as places to engage in games of chance that would allow them to preserve their political, cultural, and moral identities.
In Louis Pasteur, the distinguished French immunologist and physician Patrice Debre offers the most extensive, balanced, and detailed account of the scientist's life, struggles, and contributions yet written. First published in France in 1994 to mark the centenary of Pasteur's death in 1895, Debre's biography draws heavily on Pasteur's own scientific notebooks and writings to present a complete critical account of his discoveries and of the controversies they raised with other scientists, occasionally with his closest associates, and with historians ever since. Debre provides an extremely well documented narrative of Pasteur's life and family, as well as his relations with the French government and the established scientific and medical communities. And he places Pasteur in historical context, describing the politics and culture of nineteenth-century France and sketching portraits of the other scientists, including Marcelin Berthelot, Emile Littre, and Claude Bernard, whose life or work became intertwined with Pasteur's.