Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Surprisingly pleasant, 25 Feb 2007
I am a Frenchman living in England, and was lent this book by an English friend. I was worried it might be ladden with stereotypes, as is inevitable, but was actually quite happy with the way the authors portrayed my native land. Obviously it isn't possible to have a comprehensive review of any country by spending just three years and 350 pages on it, but they did a fair job of it in my opinion.
I actually learnt a lot about the way anglo-saxons look at us, and gave me an insight in how both foreigners and I react in different ways. Overall very interesting, I can't remember any repetition that annoyed me. There were some shocking mistakes, such as the Norway and british GP errors.
To "Pas pour moi", there is an active volcanoe in France, it is the Piton de la Fournaise on the Reunion island in the Indian Ocean.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
This book is like Roquefort cheese, 27 Jun 2004
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 ?)
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Not bad, could have been better, 9 Jan 2006
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.
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