Depuis toujours, il dérange. Le curé devenu chiffonnier fonde, dès 1949, les communautés Emmaüs et déclenche en février 1954 la fameuse " insurrection de la bonté ". Son action inlassable en faveur d'une vie véritablement humaine pour chacun s'est élargie au plan international. Aujourd'hui, le mouvement Emmaüs poursuit son travail et l'Abbé Pierre crie sa révolte, infatigable bâtisseur d'espérance. Mais qui est-il, cet homme que l'on se hâte de baptiser " prophète " ? Pourquoi a-t-il fait tout cela ? Comment a-t-il réussi à le faire ? Quel est son secret ? En répondant dans ce livre à toutes ces questions, l'Abbé Pierre offre au lecteur la chance d'une vraie rencontre.

Ces 100 Esquisses sont autant de nouvelles de mythologie comparée. Dumézil y pratique un art du récit savant à cheval sur plusieurs cultures. Comment les mondes germanique, indo-iranien, Rome, la Grèce, se sont-ils rencontrés et entremêlés à travers leurs mythes ? Dans cette série de courts chapitres sont rassemblées, entre autres, toutes les pistes que permet d'explorer la théorie des trois fonctions exposée dans Mythe et épopée. Chaque Esquisse pose une énigme mythologique, trace les contours d'une problématique, sème des idées de solution. Il y a là la somme d'une vie entière de recherches et de lectures autour de la métamorphose des mythes et de la résurrection des dieux.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) was one of the most formidable artists of the late nineteenth century, and one whose work was to have a profound influence on the development of art in the twentieth. He began as an Impressionist, but went on to develop a more two-dimensional, richly-coloured style in his constant search for a 'lost paradise' untouched by nineteenth-century civilization. Gauguin's romande and tragic life story is mirrored in the works in this outstanding anthology. Included are 48 full-page colour plates, not only of his best-known beautiful, atmospheric paintings of Tahiti in which Gauguin attempted to reconstruct the perfect life which he had failed to find in reality, but also of many powerful works which reflect the artist's contact with other early modern masters - Degas, Van Gogh, Cézanne. Sir Alan Bowness, who was Director of the Tate Gallery until 1988, is the author of the lively introductory essay which provides the background to the paintings, and art historian Lesley Stevenson has written an informative, clear commentary to accompany each colour plate.

La Normandie: des bords de Seine

A Sorbonne professor and curator of a Delacroix exhibit at the Bibliothèque Nationale gives readers a new, lucid, and well-illustrated study of this painter--a familiar name who is still not widely understood or popular. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), so very much tied to the history of his time, created vast canvases using that history as allegory. Therefore, he must suffer in appreciation today, when so few museumgoers have the cultural baggage they possessed a century and a half ago. So, huge canvases like The Death of Sardanapalus and The Murder of the Bishop of Liege must mean less to contemporary viewers, just as another painting, Tasso in the Hospital of Saint Anna, was more meaningful to a viewing public who had actually read the work of Torquato Tasso, author of Gerusalemme Liberata. However, the good reproductions in this book and Barthelmy Jobert's cogent analyses go far to underline Delacroix's inspiration from previous artists like Michelangelo, and his strong grasp of architecture. Princeton University Press has done a good production job on this title, although they are scandalously scant when it comes to crediting the translators, Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren (who did a clear job of translating from the original French, but are mentioned only in minuscule print on the copyright page). Even the author must have considered this unchivalrous, for he thanked the translators in his own fine-print acknowledgements at the end of the book. Apart from this detail, Jobert's Delacroix in English is a bravura effort and a very welcome and attractive addition to any bookshelf of 19th-century European art.