Books of the week – October 4

Friday 04th October 2024 12:34 AM

Demography, wars, great wines, papacy, Free France. Overview of the books of the week.

Demography

Julien Damon, The birth rate battles. What “demographic rearmament”? Dawn, 2024, €17.90

Articles and books devoted to demography are often tedious to read. This is not the case with this new book by Julien Damon, which manages to present this essential subject with a light touch. The other interest of the work is to focus on the facts and to compare them with preconceived ideas in demographic matters: effectiveness of public family policies, age of the first child, relationship between birth and marriage… Elements that Julien Damon studies in the French context with the help of excursions abroad in order to compare the different policies and their results. The author presents seven ways that would make it possible to revive the birth rate, which include housing, early childhood care, and the integration of blended couples. A global and complete vision of the subject, which is not limited to financial questions to which the debate is often reduced.

Reviews of Tigrane Yégavian

Love under the yoke of geopolitics

Salomé Parent – Rachdi Deloupy, Love, Sex and the Promised Land, report in Israel and PalestineLes Arènes BD editions, 2024, €24.

How can we renew our vision of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How can we refresh our perspective on a situation that seems at once inextricable, illegible and saturated with clichés? To respond to this challenge, a journalist and a comic book illustrator conducted a survey with sixteen Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and Jewish women and men who talk about how war and religion interfere in their romantic and intimate lives. We will read this comic book like a committed documentary: harsh, powerful and delicate. The authors survey the complexity of the realities of both camps, explaining how the conflict codifies, constrains and hurts relationships between genders. A fascinating investigation, without taboo or bias, which began in 2018 and ended on the eve of the October 7 raid. The opportunity for the authors to give voice to their witnesses as an epilogue to a work destined to become a reference on this central subject.

Historical encyclopedia of great wines

Daniel Casanave, Benoist Simmat, History of Great WinesLes Arènes BD, 2024, €30

After the incredible history of winepublished in 2018, the two authors do it again with this imposing album which retraces for the first time in comics the greatest vintages in history. In this historical and erudite fresco, ten thousand years of history of great wines are retraced with humor and love by the journalist Benoist Simmat and the designer Daniel Casanave. If the drawing seems at first glance a bit childish, we are seduced by these colorful pages which allow us to (re)know the greatest contemporary labels and their eventful histories.

From this thousand-year-old saga of great wines, it is a journey to the heart of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, medieval, modern and contemporary civilizations that is narrated to us. Thus, in the Egypt of the pharaohs, the most sought-after vineyard is called Water of the West. The Greece of Dionysus venerates the beautiful soft fruits of Thasos. Roman patricians fight to taste Falerne. During the Christian Middle Ages, kings required serving Cypriot wine or the Commandaria of the Templars. The reputation of wines from Shiraz or Gaza has stood the test of time. In South Africa, Dutch settlers imagined the ancestor of modern grands crus: Klein Constantia. Two centuries later, the Bordeaux wines, Château Lafite or Château Latour, took up the torch through the 1855 classification. The authors endeavored to create their own maps based on the clues unearthed by archaeologists, historians and other specialists. A journey through space and time, far, far from the fertile lands of antiquity, since Northern California in turn produces exceptional wines.

Church

Giovanni Maria Vian, The last popeCerf, 2024, 20€.

Written by one of the most renowned Vatican scholars and former editor-in-chief of the Osservatore Romano the daily life of the Vatican, this work goes behind the scenes of the various pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Without falling into the trap of sensationalist journalism, the work attempts to shed a dispassionate light on the crisis in the Church and dares to compare Francis to the last pope. This dive into the mysteries of the Vatican, its workings, its mysteries, its finances, its power games serves as the backdrop to an intrigue which proposes to draw up a critical assessment of the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. While Catholicism is undergoing a deep crisis, papal absolutism seems to be at its peak, but fails to reform the Roman curia and encounters serious difficulties: the relationship with money, communication, the problem of papal holiness . Ratzinger’s legacy remains fundamental, among other things, for the relationship with Judaism, for reflection on the extinction of faith in the West and for clear and determined action against the sexual abuse scandal. But his government was ineffective. Bergoglio’s pontificate is, however, unresolved and contradictory, characterized by a strong desire for reform, but also by choices which ended up accentuating divisions within the Church, thus making urgent a reflection on the exercise of papal power and episcopal collegiality.

Messages

Waiting for victory. Messages to de Gaulle and Free FranceGallimard Folio History, 2024, €9.40.

Under the direction of historian Vincent Duclert, a leading specialist in genocides, this work collects numerous messages and reports written by French soldiers and civilians who chose to join Free France. Most of these texts were written from “Captive France” by resistance figures. They testify to the sometimes inextricable difficulties to which the officers of the army of shadows are exposed in structuring networks and unifying movements with resources that are always insufficient, as evidenced by Jean Moulin’s moving missive addressed to General de Gaulle a few days before his arrest. We will also read with interest a letter with a very personal tone from Pierre Brossolette addressed to de Gaulle urging him with tact and affection to be less haughty and to take into consideration the opinion of his interlocutors. Or this long letter from Léon Blum as well as reports on Camus and Sartre; a poignant letter from Geneviève de Gaulle – in hiding addressed to her uncle. Note an unpublished text on the massacre of Oradour sur Glane reported by a witness. A happy initiative for this new work to read in a France which has lost all notion of sacrifice and transcendence.