Word: zeldin
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After 8,000 or so years of civilization, people can be forgiven for worrying that most of the possibilities for human experience have been exhausted. To the contrary, argues Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin, things have just started to get interesting. In An Intimate History of Humanity (HarperCollins; 488 pages; $25), he offers a quirky but intellectually dazzling view of our past and future by discussing such subjects as the different ways that nations have tried to conquer fear, the reason that humanity has made more progress in cooking than in making love, and the history of conversation. This last subject...
Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin argues that even after 7,000 years or so of human civilization, we have just begun to exist. Each chapter starts with a capsule biography of people who embody contemporary concerns. Most of them are women from France, which Zeldin describes as his "laboratory."TIME critic John Elsonsays the book (HarperCollins; 488 pages; $25) "offers a quirky but intellectually dazzling view of human history as a potential guide to a glorious future...
...culture that the British have always had, a profound--and mostly unreciprocated--appreciation existing under the shadow of centuries-old contempt and mistrust. (It's no mistake that France 1848-1945. The best and most comprehensive book on French culture, should have been written by an Oxford professor, Theodore Zeldin.) Braithwalie is a Gallophile as only an Englishman can be, revelling in the wine-tasting, the pharmacies, the road signs, the myriad facets of everyday, life with a delight unmediated by the ever-present chauvinism of the French: "The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from...
...Zeldin's longstanding interest in regionalism fills his new work. "Culture," he notes, "now divides France instead of unifying it." Having passed through nationalist and internationalist phases. France is presently in a pluralist stage whereby culture "is a battle for the right to live freely," he says, quoting minister Jack Lang. This notion underlies much of Zeldin's analysis of social mores as well. Defining a French national culture is "an unattainable goal." Styles of life "are ceasing to be homogeneous." There is "French taste, and French good taste." Contrary to previous stereotypes. "There is no established French attitude toward...
...irrelevancy of using Loulou de la Falaise as an example of someone "undoubtedly elegant, chic" may be excused if one keeps in mind the impossibility of defining the French in an uncontroversial way. One might paraphrase Antishthenes: One can know such and such a Frenchman, but never Frenchness. As Zeldin puts it, the book's intent is to show "what absurdities follow" when one sums up the French or any other culture in a phrase or epigram