Download or read book France 1996 Memoirs of a Writer in France written by Mary Hilaire Tavenner Ph.D. and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2001-05-23 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visit the author's website at www.DutchInk.com In 1996, Hilaire Tavenner and a small group of companions went to France from a city in Ohio named for Alsace Lorraine, France. Lorain, Ohio is the home of the Tavenner family for six generations. Her father, Robert Henderson Tavenner was a French Protestant and her mother, Mary Catherine Montgomery was an Irish Catholic. This was not an unusual combination for "the International City" on the shores of Lake Erie, famous for its eighty ethnic and church denominations! Lorain is also well known for its literary giants such as Helen Steiner Rice and Toni Morrison. Dr. Tavenner had been in a convent in upstate New York for almost twenty years and has a lifetime of devotion to Saints of the Church. Her interest in and love for the Miraculous Medal took her to France with a plan to write of her experiences when she came home. The first half of France, 1996 contains most interesting true stories of St. Catherine Laboure and the Miraculous Medal, St. Vincent de Paul, Sr. Louise de Marillac, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, St. Joan of Arc, as well as St. Bernadette and Lourdes and her travels to Taize and Cluny. The book is written in hybrid fashion in that the first half is more expository than narrative. The second half of the book, "A Week in Paris" is more narrative than expository. It describes some of the most famous locations in the world and the "typically-tourist-yet-personal-and-unique experiences" she and her companions had while there! The reader cannot help but to glean some of the most fascinating historical events and landmarks of France as s/he reads through, "A Week in Paris". The book is really two books in one. You will laugh as you hear her tell of being "mooned" in front of the world famous Opera House and just as equally be amazed to hear her speak of this most remarkable French nation! France, 1996 is a must-read for anyone planning to visit France. Dr. Tavenner has marvelous insights into pre-planning, places to stay and money-saving ideas! The book was originally written as a Christmas gift to her family in 1996, but soon became so popular, many more copies were made and sold to friends and strangers who proclaimed it a "most delightful, informative, and entertaining book." In fact, some readers responded with, "Too amazing to be true!" But it is. France, 1996 is really a series of articles, many of which have already been published around the country. Dr. Tavenner is a well-known public speaker, educator and writer. Each story of this book begins exactly the same way--for the purpose of identifying chapters from this particular book.

Download or read book French Lessons written by Alice Kaplan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself.” —The Washington Post Book World Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French “r,” attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject “that made history impossible to ignore”: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan’s discussion of the “de Man affair” —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre’s Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

Download or read book Mistakes Were Made Some in French written by Fiona Lewis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mistakes Were Made is a revealing memoir and unexpected love story from model and actress Fiona Lewis about her journey to self-acceptance as she restores a crumbling French chateau. Alone in the French countryside, Lewis reflects on her glamorous youth across London and Paris in the ’60s, Hollywood in the ’70s, and the important, sometimes disastrous, choices she made along the way. Having lived a perfectly satisfactory life in California for over two decades, Fiona Lewis wakes up one day in her fifties and asks herself, Is this it? Is this the existence I’m meant to have? She can hardly complain. After all, her life has been full of adventure and privilege: London and Paris in the ’60s, Los Angeles in the heady ’70s. Now, however, she feels lost, as if she were slipping backward over the edge of a ravine, abandoned not only by her old self, but by that reliable standby, optimism. Realizing she has to find a way to reinvent herself, she impulsively buys a rundown chateau in the South of France. (Her husband is not pleased.) Alone in the depths of the countryside, she contemplates her childhood, her affairs––Roman Polanski, Roger Vadim––her years as an actress in some good and some questionable films, and her first Hollywood marriage to the damaged son of a movie star. As the renovation drags on, fighting with a band of impossible French workmen, she is forced to battle her own fears: her failure to become a real success, her inability to have children, and her persistent fear of aging. And she has to contend with her husband, who has no interest in the French countryside. In fact, he resents her obsession with France, with the house, with the renovations. The house seems to have a hold over her, and he’s not wrong. He reluctantly visits and is annoyed by the cost of the renovation. Was she not content with him in LA? Why can’t she just be happy? It’s an age-old question and one every woman must confront, along with aging, lost love, and missed opportunities. Yet, Fiona’s wit and wisdom prevail. And this provocative, brave memoir takes a stunning turn when all those unanswered questions develop into a tender and unexpected romance.

Download or read book Peru 2002 Memoirs of a Writer in Peru written by Mary Hilaire Tavenner PhD and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2004-04-09 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visit the author's website at www.DutchInk.com During the fall of 2002, (Peru's spring), Dr. Mary Hiliare Tavenner and her sister-in-law, Sadie Gonzales Tavenner, went to visit a nun/friend who teaches English as a Second Language for the Catholic University of Peru. Sr. Joseph Louse Reichlin, OSF, is a member of a religious order whose Motherhouse is located in Syracuse, New York. After more than a year of preparation, the trio sets out to explore the culture, people and history of Peru together. They are fortunate to have well-informed and entertaining guides...Cucha Bravo, Darwin Camacho Paredes and Geraldine Collcardenes, among them. Their exploits include traveling in Lima, a city of more than eight million people...a visit to Cusco, the oldest inhabited city of the Western Hemisphere...and a stay in the Amazon River Basin. These adventurers see pirhana up close, six-inch long grasshoppers, and taste the popular Peruvian delicacy of "Cuy," cooked guinea pig. Most Americans never have the opportunity to visit Peru, but Dr. Tavenner's book is an opportunity to experience vicariously the Shrine of St. Rose of Lima, patron saint of all the Americas, and the first saint from the Western Hemisphere to be canonized. You will also learn of the great, and dealy beloved St. Martin de Porres, patron saint of interrracial and social justice. The reader will venture into the Sacred Valley and learn of ancient civilizations who continue to revere Mother Earth, "Pachamama." Tavenner's book includes the accomplishments and terror of Francisco Pizzaro, both famous and infamous Spanish Conqueror. You will see images of the Peruvian homeless, the glorious natural beauty of the diverse topography, along with snippets of their intimate adventure. No other travelogue has captured so much in so few pages and in such a short time! Rarely has any book ever revealed such personal reflection and response from an author. This book records a two-week-long Peruvian odyssey. How many people have ventured to a foreign country and returned home with the desire to tell and to share their experiences with family and friends? This author takes this natural inclination one step further...she writes of and publishes her exploits in a book! The reader will actually feel the spontaneity of Tavenner's journey as it unfolds with each passing day. Dr. Tavenner is interviewed in Peru on a national cable network and gives her first international lectures to the faculty, students and staff of the Language Dept. for Catholic University of Peru! Tavenner is obviously edified and inspired by the 30 plus years of missionary work accomplished by native born Hawaiian, Sr. Francis Clare de Gracia, OSF, and the other Franciscan sisters devoted to the people of Peru. Both she and her companion, Sadie, are continuously gratified for the delicious Franciscan hospitality of the sisters. Dr. Tavenner proudly dedicates the memoirs of her Peruvian adventure to the memory of her brother, Garth Montgomery Tavenner (1945-2000) and his entire New Mexico family.

Download or read book The House in France written by Gully Wells and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid, funny and moving memoir about growing up in an astonishing family; a love-letter to a mother and to an extraordinary house 'A superbly entertaining memoir full of delicious anecdote, witty portraiture, and unexpected pathos' Zoe Heller 'The cast of characters in Gully Wells's memoir is certainly entertaining ... exquisitely delivered' Sunday Times In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully Wells returns to La Migoua, the house in Provence which belonged to her mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells. Surrounded by the clutter of decades, Gully is taken back to her childhood, to her mother, her adored stepfather - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A. J. Ayer - and to the rich, sensual memories that the house evokes. Gully's beautiful, rebellious mother Dee fled Boston when she was seventeen to join the Canadian Army, where she became a Sergeant Major. She married, had Gully, divorced and moved to London where she would meet, and fall madly in love with, the icon of logical positivism, Ayer, who she would later persuade to marry her. There they lived in an extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, George Melly and Bertrand Russell. In the turbulent and vibrant milieu of sixties London, Gully develops from a cautious only child to a studious teenager. She has a childhood infatuation with the aristocratic homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers, loses her virginity to a Provençal hairdresser and wins a scholarship to St Hilda's at Oxford, where she blossoms, studies French history under Theodore Zeldin, and falls in love with fellow student, Martin Amis. But as the affair ends, Gully moves on, explores love and travel, eventually settling down in New York. La Migoua, perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles, is inextricably woven into Gully's existence. Unsentimental and gloriously witty, The House in France is a vivid and moving love letter to a beloved mother, and a celebration of family, of growing up and of the spirit of a cherished house.

Download or read book An American Heroine in the French Resistance written by Virginia D'Albert-Lake and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account by a woman who fought the Nazis alongside her husband is “an indelible portrait of extraordinary strength of character” (The New Yorker). Virginia Roush fell in love with Philippe d’Albert-Lake during a visit to France in 1936; they married soon after. In 1943, they both joined the Resistance, where Virginia put her life in jeopardy as she sheltered downed airmen and later survived a Nazi prison camp. After the war, she stayed in France with Philippe, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and the Medal of Honor. This book includes two rare documents—Virginia’s diary of wartime France until her capture in 1944, and her prison memoir written immediately after the war. Together they offer “an invaluable record of the workings of the French Resistance by one of the very few American women who participated in it” (Providence Journal). “A sharply etched and moving story of love, companionship, commitment, and sacrifice . . . This beautifully edited diary and memoir throw an original light on the French Resistance.” —Robert Gildea, author of Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 “At once a stunning self-portrait and dramatic narrative of a valorous young American woman . . . an exciting and gripping story.” —Walter Cronkite

Download or read book A Year in Provence written by Peter Mayle and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glorious regional cuisine. A Year in Provence transports us into all the earthy pleasures of Provençal life and lets us live vicariously at a tempo governed by seasons, not by days.

Download or read book When The World Spoke French written by Marc Fumaroli and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Review Books Original During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous “sweetness of life” nourished by France and its language.

Download or read book Paris in Love written by Eloisa James and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Wilde in Love, a joyful chronicle of a year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world: Paris. “What a beautiful and delightful tasting menu of a book: the kids, the plump little dog, the Italian husband. Reading this memoir was like wandering through a Parisian patisserie in a dream. I absolutely loved it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love When bestselling romance author Eloisa James took a sabbatical from her day job as a Shakespeare professor, she also took a leap that many people dream about: She sold her house and moved her family to Paris. With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog). Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a New York Times bestselling author and her spirited, enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour. Praise for Paris in Love “Exhilarating and enchanting . . . brims with a casual wisdom about life.”—Chicago Tribune “In this delightful charm-bracelet of a memoir, [Eloisa James shares] her adventures as an American suddenly immersed in all things French—food, clothes, joie de vivre.”—People “Enchanting . . . gives the reader a sense of being immersed along with James in Paris for a year . . . you see the rain, taste the food, observe the people.”—USA Today “This delectable confection, which includes recipes, is more than a visit to a glorious city: it is also a tour of a family, a marriage, and a love that has no borders. Très magnifique!”—Library Journal (starred review) “A charming, funny and poignant memoir . . . steeped in Paris and suffused with love.”—Star Tribune “Charming . . . a romance—for a city, a life, a family, and love itself.”—The Huffington Post

Download or read book Greater France written by Robert Aldrich and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1996-09-15 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the most up-to-date research and theories, Greater France provides a comprehensive and lively account of France`s imperial adventure, from the sands of the Sahara to the jungles of equatorial Africa, from the lush rice paddies of Indochina to the legendary isles of Polynesia.

Download or read book When in French written by Lauren Collins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does “I love you” even mean the same thing as “je t’aime”? When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins—fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn’t understand her own kids—decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French. When in French is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages—and what they say about who we are. Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidently telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society—which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity’s many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning—and living in—French.

Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Download or read book Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth century Paris written by comtesse Cäleste Vänard de Chabrillan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Cäleste Mogador's memoirs were first published in 1854 and again in 1858, they were immediately seized and condemned as immoral and unsuitable for public consumption. For a reader in our more forgiving times, this extraordinary document offers not only a portrait of the early life of an intelligent, courageous, and infinitely intriguing Frenchwoman but also an exceedingly rare inside look at the world of the courtesans and prostitutes of nineteenth-century France. ø Writing to conciliate judges and creditors, Mogador (born Cäleste Venard in 1824) explains how with tenacity, wit, and audacity, she managed to escape a difficult childhood and subsequent life of prostitution to become, successively, a darling of the dance halls, a circus rider, and an actress, all the while attracting wealthy young men who vied for her favor. Although her account gives readers a peek into the rakish demimonde made famous by Verdi's opera La Traviata, its greatest value lies in its candid picture of a spunky, self-educated woman who doggedly transformed herself into an esteemed and prolific novelist and playwright, who fell in love with a count and married him, and who made her name synonymous with the bohemian life of the 1840s and 1850s in Paris.

Download or read book Intimate Memoirs written by Georges Simenon and published by San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book was released on 1984 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pancakes in Paris written by Craig Carlson and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a New York Times Bestseller Paris was practically perfect... Craig Carlson was the last person anyone would expect to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams, although one thing was still missing-the good ol' American breakfast he loved so much. Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible-from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients... and even finding love along the way. His diner, Breakfast In America, is now a renowned tourist destination, and the story of how it came to be is just as delicious and satisfying as the classic breakfast that tops its menu.

Download or read book Sins of the Innocent written by Mireille Marokvia and published by Unbridled Books. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her first memoir—Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the-Wisp—Mireille Marokvia described her life growing up in a small village near Chartres, France, in the first decades of the 20th Century. We learned in that beautiful book that the people in her life so long past still live like ghosts in her memory. This extraordinarily sensitive and assured writer brings that same dear voice and sharp vision to bear in her new book. But Sins of the Innocent covers the most difficult years of her life. From Paris in 1939, a young Mireille follows her artist husband, Abel, when he returns to Germany to care for his mother. Once Hitler begins his invasions across Europe the displaced couple must find a way to survive the war in a country they both consider foreign. Abel finally takes work, but it requires extensive travel through the war zones, and so Mireille is left essentially alone. With France lost to her, and horribly misfit in wartime Germany, suspected by her neighbors of spying for the Allies, Mireille has to define a life for herself, a life that is as quiet as possible in a dangerous world. Sins of the Innocent is a lyrical portrait of those harsh years, infused with doubt, anger, and the author’s love of life. These were the years in which Mireille learned the difference between quiet persistence and courage—during WWII in Europe, a time when so many had to find their own small places in history. It was the era that determined who Mireille Marokvia was—and who she still is. Read Mireille Marokvia’s account of the making of the manuscript in “History of a Story.”

Download or read book Herculine Barbin written by Michel Foucault and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris. Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.