Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the centre of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. An exploration of the pig in Judeo-Christian culture and European anti-semitism, this work chronicles the cultural and religious character of a creature that occupies an ambiguous place in the families of those who raise them - at once nearly a member of the family and a potential meal. The author details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the rituals that have been associated with the slaughter and consumption of pigs from the Middle Ages until today. The book also demonstrates the continuing power of symbols to sustain or create ethnic identities.

Olivier Roy demonstrates that Islamic Fundamentalism of today is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s: populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich and subsidies for the poor. In Roy's striking formulation, those marching today beneath Islam's green banners are the same as the 'reds' of yesterday, with similarly dim prospects of success. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this is a book that no one trying to understand Islamism can afford to overlook.

Throughout history, the slaughter and consumption of the pig has been the inspiration for role-playing and taboos, and at the centre of practices that defined the boundaries between Christians and Jews. An exploration of the pig in Judeo-Christian culture and European anti-semitism, this work chronicles the cultural and religious character of a creature that occupies an ambiguous place in the families of those who raise them - at once nearly a member of the family and a potential meal. The author details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans and the rituals that have been associated with the slaughter and consumption of pigs from the Middle Ages until today. The book also demonstrates the continuing power of symbols to sustain or create ethnic identities.

However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycees of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth. Monumental in its scope, minute in its attention to detail, A History of Young People takes us into the sensational rituals surrounding youth in Roman antiquity (such as the Lupercalia, with its nudity and whipping) and into the chivalric trials awaiting the privileged young of the Middle Ages. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan and Michel Pastoureau explore the elusive question of what defines youth, a concept that over time has reached from infancy to the age of forty. Elliott Horowitz and Renata Ago consider the young in the context of the family--within the different worlds of European Judaism and Catholicism through the Renaissance. Sabina Loriga takes us through three centuries of military experience to temper and complicate our assumptions about the youthful face of war. Michelle Perrot focuses on working-class youth, and Jean-Claude Caron on the young at school. The obedient and the rebellious are here, the cherished and the sacrificed, the children catapulted into adult responsibility, the adults who have yet to forsake the protections of childhood. What emerges in this history as never before is a vast, richly textured picture of youth as a changing constant of culture, society, economics, politics, and art, and as a uniquely complex experience of acculturation in every life.

Renoir on Renoir is a 1990 collection of essays by, and interviews of, the legendary filmmaker Jean Renoir, who created such classics as The Grand Illusion, The River and The Rules of the Game. Renoir's career in cinema, which straddled the transition from silent film to the talkies, has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers. Between 1954 and 1967, Renoir was interviewed by such eminent filmmakers and theorists as Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut and Jacques Becker. The interviews were originally recorded and published in the distinguished French film review Cahiers du Cinema, and shown on French television. They are an engaging account of Renoir's deep commitment to his chosen profession. Providing additional information on his ideas and theories on screen writing and directing, Renoir's essays also include lively anecdotes of the genesis and evolution of each of his films. They reveal behind-the-scenes of some of the masterpieces of French cinema.

This collection of essays by the film-maker and critic, one of the founding members of the French "New Wave" cinema, was originally written for the French film review Cahiers du Cinema between 1948 and 1979.

The fundamental gesture of weaving in "The Craft of Zeus" is the interlacing of warp and woof described by Plato in "The Statesman"--an interweaving signifying the union of opposites. From rituals symbolizing--even fabricating--the cohesion of society to those proposed by oracles as a means of propitiating fortune; from the erotic and marital significance of weaving and the woven robe to the use of weaving as a figure for language and the fabric of the text, this lively and lucid book defines the logic of one of the central concepts in Greek and Roman thought--a concept that has persisted, woof and warp crossing again and again, as the fabric of human history has unfolded.

Casablanca and Tangier provide the backdrops for Corruption, an exotic and erotic tale of modern-day morality, reminiscent of Camus's The Stranger. Mourad is the last honest man in Morocco. Much to the chagrin of his boss, his colleagues, and his materialistic wife, he adamantly refuses to accept "commissions" for his work. But his honesty goes unappreciated. Criticized for condemning his family to a life of poverty, encouraged by his boss to be more "flexible", Mourad finally gives in: just one envelope stuffed with cash, then another... Ben Jelloun's compelling novel evokes the universal dangers of succumbing to the daily temptations of modern life, as Mourad lives the consequences of betraying his own conscience after a lifetime of honesty and resistance.