The Modern World

Joseph J. Ellis reviewed The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 in the NY Times. Author Jay Winick has "an uncanny knack for syntheizing the work of others," Ellis wrote. Ellis's fundamental comment on the book is that personalities of political leaders receive too much credit and the underlying forces receive too little emphasis. It sounds like a well done and well conceived book.

France

I admit to being a Francophile. I noticed the New York Times reviewed The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War," by Graham Robb, reviewed as the lead review in the Book Review section of the Times today. Sounds like a very interesting book.

Here's a URL for NYT review (it's different on line from the one that appeared in the newspaper)(signing may be required): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/books/02book.html
The guardian's review appears on line here:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,,2165224,00.html

Here's a sentence from the Guardian review: "Graham Robb's first aim in this elegant, entertaining and occasionally brilliant overview of France past and present is to argue that France still matters - but not for the reasons that we usually ascribe to 'la Grande Nation'." The Guardian disses France, but the UK takes a different angle from the one in the US.

The Middle Stage HOMEPAGE, by Chandrahas Choudhury, wrote this:

http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/10/travelling-with-graham-robb.html
His new book takes the reader into the mental and physical universe of the millions of faceless people who, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were at the work of "discovering France" – gradually working their way into a sense of a world larger than that of their immediate village and province. The word pays, Robb observes, is translated today as "country" but it derives from pagus, or the area controlled by a tribe, and refers not so much to the abstract nation but to a smaller region that people thought of as home: "A pays was the area in which everything was familiar...To someone with little experience of the world, the pays could be measured in fields and furrows."

Graham Robb's books:
# Baudelaire: Lecteur de Balzac (1988), ISBN 2-7143-0279-3 (French)
# Baudelaire (1989), ISBN 0-241-12458-1, translation of 1987 French text by Claude Pichois
# La Poésie de Baudelaire et la poésie française, 1838-1852 (1993), ISBN 2-7007-1657-4, criticism (French)
# Balzac: A Biography (1994), ISBN 0-330-33237-6
# Unlocking Mallarmé (1996), ISBN 0-03-000648-1
# Victor Hugo (1997), ISBN 0-330-33707-6
# Rimbaud (2000), ISBN 0-330-48282-3
# Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (2003), ISBN 0-330-48223-8
# The Discovery of France. A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. (2007), Illustrated, 454 pp. WW Norton and Co.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Robb

http://tinyurl.com/2ek3zx

The French

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution, by Madison Smartt Bell, Norton

Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, by Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon