| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Product Description
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad, could have been better,
By
This review is from: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: What Makes the French So French? (Paperback)
This book is billed as away of understanding the cultural vagaries that exist in our nearest neighbour. In that respect it does in part fulfil its aim BUT I wouldn’t want to take the book too literally. For starters the two Canadian authors focus their research around their own personal experience (based mainly around Paris) and the experiences of their friends and colleagues, who appear to me to be fairly universally middle to upper-class with the odd bohemian style artist thrown in for good measure. This is deemed to be a good cross-section of the population sampled, but look around you in England and ask yourself – is London the fairest representation of the entire country and its culture? My other main bugbear is the amount of repetition in the book, points are made, emphasised, re-made then told one more time for good luck. This gets annoying. I know they are trying to drum the point into us but I did find myself skipping pages and feeling like I hadn’t missed anything. Anyway, did I tell you about the repetition? Well, onwards and upwards as once you get past these petty annoyances this is quite a good book. It is no-where near as funny as A Year In The Merde but does have a light hearted side that makes it a damn site more palatable that it otherwise would have been. The insights into French (Parisian) culture and lifestyle are intriguing and they offer some wonderful paradoxes, most notable was the story regarding a strike by French transport workers who were aggrieved that a train guide died at the hands of street vendors. Well it turns out the guy died of a heart attack so the union stayed on strike to complain about stressful conditions. Were the public up in arms? Not a bit of it. This book won’t give you a eureka moment but it will gently prod you to start delving a little deeper into French culture, it is not a hard hitting expose offers some easy reading that I certainly enjoyed for the time I read it.
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This book is like Roquefort cheese,
This review is from: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: What Makes the French So French? (Paperback)
A book which should have been written years ago and is immensely helpful in defining the differences between the Anglosphere and the Francosphere, it is unfortunately full of "blue bits" - that is to say sloppy grammar, poor translation ("Alsatia" for Alsace!) and lots of inaccuracies - the most amazing of which is the assertion that Norway (the only country whose population refused to join the EU) became a member in 1974! Mistakes like this (and about the important topic of Algeria) seriously undermine its value. It needs a revised and copy-edited second edition. (Are there no copy-editors now in the Anglosphere ?)
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not a chapter went by without a cliche,
By A Customer
This review is from: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: What Makes the French So French? (Paperback)
Very interesting topic and also some interesting chapters, but the book is clearly about 100 pages too long, contains a number of errors, some already pointed out here.Something that particularly annoyed me was the constant 'during our years in France not a week went by without a bombing or murder in Corsica', swiping generalisations that undermine the arguments and overall credibility of the book. You will also get the 'didn't I just read this?' feeling as a number of things are mentioned more than once. Having said that if you have ever lived in France you will now understand the smugness of all those who boasts about their diplomas from the 'Grande Ecole/ ENA/ IEP/ ESSEC etc'
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
