ET Books

Jean Potocki-Oeuvres II: Voyage a Astrakan Et Sur LA Ligne De Caucase - Memoire Sur L'Ambassade En Chine edited by F. Rosset, D. Triaire (La Republique Des Lettres, 12: Peeters)
Après les voyages a l'Ouest (Turquie, Egypte, Hollande, Maroc, Basse-Saxe: voir le volume I de notre edition), Jean Potocki tourne ses regards vers l'Orient: en 1797, il parcourt le Caucase; en 1805, it prend la route de la Chine et vers 1811, il s'enthousiasme pour la Crimée. Ces trois voyages don¬nerent lieu a relation. Le texte du Voyage a Astrakan et sur la ligne du Caucase suit ici pour la première fois le manuscrit original; il est augmenté du journal adressé a Stanislas Auguste, roi de Pologne, exile a Saint-Petersbourg. Le Mémoire sur l'ambassade en Chine est suivi du Rapport sur les activités des savants places sous la direction de Potocki pendant l'ambassade. Enfin le petit texte sur le projet immobilier de Sophio-polis n'avait plus ete publié depuis sa parution confidentielle au debut du xixe siècle.
Rompant avec les précédentes relations, le Voyage dans quelques parties de la Basse-Saxe obéissait principalement a une exigence scientifique: it ne s'agis¬sait plus au gré d'un itinéraire vagabond de collecter des étonnements, des surprises. A partir de 1794, Potocki cherche a construire un discours, organiser une representation sur l'histoire des Slaves, les populations caucasiennes ou la diplomatic russe en Extreme-Orient. Le voyage est devenu pretexte, matière première d'une elaboration intellectuelle; en ce sens, it offre une synthèse de oeuvre de Potocki, réunissant aussi bien les travaux historiques que les choix politiques ou l'expérimentation narrative.
Ce deuxième volume des Euvres de Jean Potocki a éte prepare par Dominique Triaire, professeur a l'Université Paul-Valery Montpellier III.

I saw the Houdon exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and it is astonishing--as is this gorgeous catalogue. Houdon's brilliance as a portraitist and psychologist shines through in his amazingly lifelike busts of Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, Thomas Jefferson, Catherine the Great, Voltaire and many more. In fact, the book offers a veritable Who's Who-or Who was Anybody--in the second half of the eighteenth century. Rogues and nobility alike brought miraculously to life in stone. This volume is a must for anyone interested in French, European or American art and culture of the revolutionary period. Lavishly illustrated, it promises to be the definitive work on Houdon for many years to come.

Individual and collective hygiene are integral part of J.J. Rousseau's thought. For him, like those who held neo-hippocratic principles of the 18th century, nature is the great healer; toxemia (accumulation of catabolic wastes or toxins into the body) is the cause of diseases; enervation is at the origin of metabolic problems; and education must favor the development of body and mind.

Two centuries after his death, the naturism of Rousseau finds a new echo in alternative medicine and philosophy. It is useful therefore to re-read the master, particularly his books Émile and Nouvelle Héloïse. This is what did S.A. Theriault. In this book, he shows how Rousseau received, during his life, the influence of Naturist doctors and disseminated their ideas in his writings.

This amazing book has 96 primary sources - excerpts from books and essays by and about pre-emancipation Jews, discussing topics as varied as Christian and Muslim oppression of Jews, Jewish religious law, Jewish false messiahs, and Jewish education.

Some of the more interesting things I learned:

*That Christian oppression of Jews began almost as soon as Christians took over the Roman Empire. Just a few years after Constantine (Rome's first Christian emperor) took power, he issued relatively mild decrees against Jews converting or intermarrying Christians. A Jew who converted and circumcised a non-Jewish slave could be subject to capital punishment. A century later, Theodosius actually prohibited Jews from erecting new synagogues.

On the other hand, as late as the 1750s Frederick II of Prussia prohibited Jews from establishing private synagogues, and sought to regulate exactly which prayers Jews could engage in.

*Just as Jews sought to distance themselves from Christians, Christians did the same. A 300 Spanish church council prohibited Christians from eating with Jews. And in 325, the Council of Nicaea changed the date of Easter to ensure that Easter's dating was not dependent on the dating of the Jewish Passover. (Some early Christian communities, by contrast, celebrated Easter on the first night of Passover).

*The sheer diversity of Jewish customs over the centuries. Some Jews today think that the most distinctively dressed groups (such as the Hasidim) are the most "traditional" or "authentic" Jews. But a 1748 essay describing Shearith Israel (a still-prospering New York synagogue) writes that "Both men and women were dressed entirely in the English fashion; the former had all of them their hats on." (I visited Shearith Israel a few years ago, and today, hats are still more popular than in other shuls!) . Another essay describes Shabbat dinner in Alexandria, Egypt in the 15th century: Jews drank cups of wine, alternating with fruit, and did not start eating meat, etc. until they had drained six or seven cups!

*In the past as today, Jews struggled with observance, especially while traveling. From a 1748 description of New York Jews: "They commonly eat no pork; yet I have been told by several men of credit, that many of them (especially among the young Jews) when traveling, did not make the least difficulty about eating this, or any other meat that was put before them..."

*The amount of internal self-government in some Jewish communities. In 1637, the Jewish leadership of Lithuania held that in order to prevent Jews from overspending on marriages and other festive occasions, a local rabbi should "consider the number of guests which it is suitable for every individual, in view of his wealth and the occasion, to invite to a festive meal."

*The backwardness of a few Jewish communities. For example, the memoirs of Solomon Maimon describes his elementary school in Mirz, Poland as follows: "[His teacher] was the terror of all young people, `the scourge of God'; he treated those in his charge with unheard of cruelty, flogged them till the blood came, even for the slightest offense ... When the parents of these unfortunates came to him, and took him to task, he struck them with stones and whatever else came to hand, and drove them with his stick out of the house . . . All under his discipline became either blockheads or good scholars." Of course, the book contains an ample selection of essays about Jewish leaders who ensured that better contains prevailed.

I moved to Washington D.C in the mid-1970s and have lived here, with a brief period in suburban Maryland, ever since. For most of that time, I have not been a practicing Jew, but this book struck deep chords with me.
I had a similar reaction to another book in the Images of America Series, "Jewish Milwaukee" by Martin Hintz, which is a photographic documentary of the city in which I grew up. But Dr. Martin Garfinkle's book, "The Jewish Community of Washington, D.C." has, somehow, a tougher, livelier feel. It brought the Washington Jewish community to life and, equally important, it brought Washington D.C. to life.

Dr Garfinkle is a fourth-generation Washingtonian who currently holds an academic position in New York City. The many pictures of his family give this book a highly personal touch. Although some Jews, such as the Garfinkles, have deep roots in the city, most have come to the city from somewhere else, just as I have done, and lack long generational ties to Washington D.C.

The book focuses on Washington D.C. itself rather than the subtantial Jewish communities that have arisen in recent years in suburban Maryland and Virginia. The book is in ten chapters, the first three of which are comparatively lengthy with the remaining seven chapters short and particularized. There is much emphasis in the book on American patriotism within the Jewish community which I found gratifying and important.

The first chapter of the book describes, appropriately, Jewish worship in Washington D.C. I particularly enjoyed seeing the photographs of the earliest synagogues in what is today a part of the city near Chinatown and the Martin Luther King library. Many of these old buildings are still functional houses of worship for Christian churches. Garfinkle also offers photographs of former Jewish synagogues in Southwest D.C. and along the Georgia Avenue and 16th Street corridors, areas I know well.

In the second chapter of the book, "Making a Living", Garfinkle offers some wonderfully rare old photographs of small shops, grocery stores, "bargain" stores, clothing and jewelry stores, gas stations, auto parts stores, book stores, liquor stores, and restaurants. He offers a portrait of a striving, vibrant people and community. We see the inside of shops and small storefronts on Georgia Avenue and downtown Washington that are no more. The book offers a fascinating portrayal of the everyday life of newcomers to the city and of middle-class people. The photos date from the pre-New Deal era in which Jewish people were not a large presence in the Federal Civil Service.

The third chapter of the book discusses the many organizations and activities in which the D.C. Jewish community has been engaged over the years. Family activities, such as a home seder, and community activities, such as athletic activities, confirmations and groundbreakings for new buildings are featured. Presidents including Grant, McKinley, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower took an active part over the years in activities involving the dedication of buildings and institutions of Jewish life in Washington D.C. Surprisingly to me, Calvin Coolidge appeared particularly and sincerely interested in these ceremonial functions.

The remaining sections of the book deal with interesting specific themes. Garfinkle, sharing the passion of many Jewish people for baseball, discusses three Jewish players on the old Washington Senators. Further chapters focus on Al Jolson, the son of a famous Rabbi in Southwest D.C, an early Jewish avaiation pioneer, Washington D.C. Jews who gave their lives in WW II, Jews and African-Americans, a subject that deserves further exploration, U.S. Presidents, and individual moments, such as the unsolved murder of Rabbi Philip Rabinowitz of the Orthodox Kesher Israel Congreation in Georgetown in 1984.

I loved this book with its focus on the city and on the diverse and active lives of Jews in Washington D.C. Garfinkle offers an eloquent, individualized portrayal of a Jewish community in urban America.

Robin Friedman

I only recently became aware of Joan Mitchell's work through the help of my art teacher and I'm so glad. I don't think you'll be able to find a more informative or complete collection of her work and her background. Her work is intermingled with the biographical information in chronological order in many great and often oversized (fold out) color plates.

This is one for your permanent art collection.

I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur, his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

Nicolas Bouvier is the perfect traveler and an inspired travel writer. He was observant and attentive. He traveled to the remote places (devoting his whole life after college to traveling), saw the beauty of everyday life and ordinary things there, and writes about it with elegance and style. His books are separated from the travel guides and popular travelogues by an abyss - they are not rushed, without advice for tourists, and do not describe only the popular areas. Travel is for him more rather an object of study or contemplation.

In fact, reading "The Diary from Aran and other places" (free translation of the title, I have read the Polish translation and the review is placed under the French original - I could not find the English edition (does it exist???) was almost like a Zen experience.

The main part of the book describes the author's journey to Aran islands in Ireland, the villages and fishermen, the sea, small houses, sand, everyday life with the elements, evoking the profound feeling of natural power of the North.

The other parts can be said to be more "classically" Zen, as they are about Korea and China, where religion and spirituality mix with the simple activities.
All works of Bouvier are recommended for people who like riding about travels, who believe that life is a journey, which should be retold...

The madcap stories and parodies in this collection will have you sputtering with laughter. Any fan of Jane Austen will be guaranteed to adore this book.

But, there is a bonus benefit to this particular edition. When I received my copy in the mail, I was a little startled, because the book weighed a ton, and each of its pages was thick and nearly laminated. The cover looked like it was produced on a dot-matrix printer from clip art, and it had the overall appearance of being a pre-release edition. There was even an apologetic note from Amazon, saying that this was the best available edition, and if I didn't like it I could return it, etc. But, I soon realized that this 'bad' plastic edition had a wonderful advantage - I could take it in the bath with me, and it didn't even get damp. There's something very zen about laughing like a maniac while in a hot bathtub. I wholeheartedy recommend the experience to you.

I've been in association and nonprofit marketing for 12 years, and this is one of the best resources I've found. It offers sound advice based on research and case studies from a range of associations, and does a good job addressing the "myths" that many people assume are true about getting and keeping more members. The "Strategic Retention Audit" at the end provides a valuable checklist. This book should be on the shelf of every professional who works for a membership organization.