Life is not a reality show

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P. Huerre, M. Pagan-Reymond, J.M. Reymond

L'enfance, l'âge adulte, la vieillesse existent assurément. Mais l'adolescence? S'agit-il d'un passage obligé, fatal, ou bien, au contraire, d'un phénomène socio-culturel qui reflète tous les signes du malaise de plus en plus visible d'un monde en mutation? L'adolescence est, en effet, un concept récent dans l'histoire des hommes. Les sociétés primitives ne le connaissent pas et des sociétés très évoluées -la Grèce, Rome, la France du Moyen Age et des Temps modernes- l'ont ignoré. Mettant en évidence le caractère relatif et artificiel de cet entre-deux-âges par l'observation de ses manifestations et de ses avatars au fil des temps, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, cet essai montre que l'on assiste à une mise en scène de l'adolescence où ce sont tour à tour (ou simultanément) la nature, l'Etat, la famille, la religion, l'économie, la démographie, les concepts éducatifs ... qui lui décrivent son rôle.

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Wolfgang Schivelbusch

"History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his new book, but the losers often have the final word. Focusing on three seminal cases of defeat - the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I - Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat.". "Drawing on reaction from every level of society, Schivelbusch investigates the sixty-year period in which the world moved from regional to global conflagration, and from gentlemanly conduct of war to total mutual destruction. He shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a "better North," the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic "plantation legend" after the collapse of the Confederacy, the new cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France, the fiction of the stab in the back by "foreign" elements in postwar Germany. From cathartic epidemics of "dance-madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures."--BOOK JACKET.

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Pascal Bruckner

The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought--birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our new freedoms have also brought new burdens and rules--without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desires, and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical. Drawing on history, politics, psychology, literature, pop culture, and current events, this book--a best seller in France--exposes and dissects these paradoxes. With his customary brilliance and wit, Bruckner traces the roots of sexual liberation back to the Enlightenment in order to explain love's supreme paradox, epitomized by the 1960s oxymoron of "free love": the tension between freedom, which separates, and love, which attaches. Ashamed that our sex lives fail to live up to such liberated ideals, we have traded neuroses of repression for neuroses of inadequacy, and we overcompensate: "Our parents lied about their morality," Bruckner writes, but "we lie about our immorality." Mixing irony and optimism, Bruckner argues that, when it comes to love, we should side neither with the revolutionaries nor the reactionaries. Rather, taking love and ourselves as we are, we should realize that love makes no progress and that its messiness, surprises, and paradoxes are not merely the sources of its pain--but also of its pleasure and glory.

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Andy G. Khumbanyiwa

Aims to give new initiative and approaches to life for Malawians to improve their lives and have hope and control over their destiny.