Quét Lá Sân Chùa tải về miễn phí cuốn sách

Jodi Baskoro jodibaskoro — I'd read a lot of rave reviews of this book, so I was keen to read it even though I rarely read non-fiction. So I snapped it up as part of a 3-for-2 offer. It isn't exactly what I'd expected -- the publisher's blurb makes much of Robb cycling 14,000 miles round rural France, enabling him to get a close-up view of landscape and history, but at least as significant is the four years he spent in libraries! This book is a treasure-trove of quirky anecdotes and unexpected aspects of French history. He's obviously a serious historian, with books on Balzac and Rimbaud to his credit, but he writes in an accessible way, always retaining the reader's interest. It's difficult to classify, combining history, geography, anthropology and linguistics. Robb brings home just how empty, poor, and far from "civilisation" parts of rural France were, even in the 18th and 19th century, and -- as I already knew -- how few people spoke French as their first language. There are some compelling images: the peasants who basically hibernated in winter to conserve energy because they didn't have enough to eat; the cartloads of abandoned babies (because their families couldn't feed them): "The carters set out on their two hundred and fifty mile journey with four or five babies to a basket ... To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instead of milk. Those that dies were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples... for every ten babies that reached Paris, only one survived more than three days." The chapter on religion has some entertaining anecdotes. Speaking of the traditional fondness for local saints who mirrored earlier pagan gods, he writes: "The church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not particularly interested in thr creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave." Then there were the women who, offended by their priest's threat of excommunication, "stormed the altar, tore off his wig, destroyed the processional crosses, and beat him with the pieces." There are more serious insights here too: for example, he writes that the French obsession with commemoration of significant events on specific dates highlights the reverse: the events that are not commemmorated. He cites the failure to acknowledge Vichy's role in deporting Jews during the Second World War, and the embarrassed silence over Algeria, but this reminded me too of the "hidden history" of refugees fleeing Franco in 1939, treated as criminals and herded into camps in France. Only now, 70 years later, is this event being publicly commemmorated and the failures of the French authorities recognised. Anyway, I won't burble on any longer -- if you are interested in France, more especially if you are a foreigner living in France and want to understand better why the French are the way they are, this book is definitely worth reading.