Two Books of Interest

Today's photo is another shot of downtown Herbignac taken on the day of our snow. I love our streetlights.

Some may have already seen this post. I wrote and posted this last Saturday, when Blogger.com was behaving very strangely (It would not allow photo uploads). The post was visible for a day and then vanished mysteriously - I can only assume this was caused by their engineers restoring something from a backup. In any event, the original post was fortuitously archived on my server and is reposted here:


This is just a quickie post to mention two books that may be of interest to fans of French/American culture. The first is Bernard Henri-Levy's American Vertigo. BHL is a self-described "anti-anti-American" - a European intellectual who is genuinely fond of the US instead of falling into the kneejerk "America=Bad" mentality that so many intelligentsia here do. I have not read this book yet, and in fact I am hoping to hear from others who have. I mention it because so much of the cross-culture literature is built on American and British experiences in France, rather than vice-versa, and I for one am very interested to read what this Frenchman thought of the US as he traveled across it.

For a more humorous and stereotypical take on the subject of cultural (mis)relations, I can suggest Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde. We received this book as a Christmas gift and it was entertaining and often hilarious from start to finish, though I would in no way suggest that this is a typical look at French culture. Easily half the problems in the book are brought on by the author himself, who carries a thinly-veneered attitude of, "Ah, we Brits are so superior, isn't it quaint how disorganized and backwards these Frenchies are?" While I was able to read it from a neutral perspective and laugh at both the cultural blunders and the author's own skewed perspective, I suspect that French readers might find a good chunk of the book either patronizing or downright offensive. It is in many ways a classic case study of how we make our own problems when we change cultures, according to what aspects of our old culture we drag along with us.