Joan DeJean, Author . Free Press $25 (302p) ISBN 978-0-7432-6413-6
Not only do French women not get fat, they've led the world in style for the past 300 years. French historian DeJean's premise is simple yet wonderfully effective: largely because of one obsessive spendthrift, Louis XIV, France, in the late...
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Joan DeJean, Author . Bloomsbury $28 (295p) ISBN 978-1-59691-405-6
French cultural historian DeJean presents an entertaining account of how home life was virtually reinvented in Paris from 1670 to 1765 as sofas, running water and flush toilets appeared in modern residences: the city became “a giant workshop...
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Joan DeJean. Bloomsbury, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-1-60819-591-6
Although 19th-century Baron Haussmann often receives credit for Paris’s iconic features, this witty and engaging work shows that it was the 17th-century Bourbon monarchs who first transformed Paris into the prototype of the modern city that would...
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Joan DeJean. Basic, $32 (448p) ISBN 978-1-5416-0058-4
University of Pennsylvania historian DeJean (How Paris Became Paris) paints an intriguing portrait of the early 18th-century French women who overcame “false arrests and trumped-up charges,” forced deportation, hurricanes, and other hardships to...
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