Vie Est Belle

La Vie est Belle is the perfect gift for Francophiles or those with a passion for the best things in life—elegant interiors, ageless beauty and tradition, and fine food and wine. “France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.” F. Scott Fitzgerald This celebration and distillation of the spirit of France provides a privileged glimpse inside 18 ravishing French homes, from chateaux to farmhouses, as well as the regions in which they are set, including Normandy, Brittany, the Ile de Ré, Paris, Provence, the Loire, and Bordeaux. The book also features insightful essays on the traditions and characteristics of French life, including pavement cafés, vineyards, classic French furniture and fabrics, regional food specialties, and more. Interspersed throughout the book are recipes for authentic French dishes and quotations from great writers and philosophers, designed to immerse you in the culture and ambience of the French way of life.

In African Film: Re-imagining a Continent, Josef Gugler provides an introduction to African cinema through an analysis of 15 films made by African filmmakers. These directors set out to re-image Africa; their films offer Western viewers the opportunity to re-imagine the continent and its people. As a point of comparison, two additional films on Africa--one from Hollywood, the other from apartheid South Africa--serve to highlight African directors' altogether different perspectives. Gugler's interpretation considers the financial and technical difficulties of African film production, the intended audiences in Africa and the West, the constraints on distribution, and the critical reception of the films.

Setting the stage for a critical encounter between Francophone African cinema and Continental European critical theory, this book offers a transnational and interdisciplinary analysis of 16 Francophone African films, including Bassek Ba Kobhio's The Great White Man of Lambarene, Cheick Oumar Sissoko's Guimba the Tyrant, and Amadou Seck's Saaraba. The author invites readers to study these films in the context of transnational conversations between African filmmakers and the conventional theorists whose works are more readily available in academia. The book examines black French filmmakers' treatments of a number of cross-cultural themes, including intercontinental encounters and reciprocity, ideology and subjective freedom, governance and moral responsibility, sexuality and social order, and globalization. Throughout the work, the presentation of literary theory is accessible by both beginning and advanced students of film and culture. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Take your Python text processing skills to another level by learning about the latest natural language processing and machine learning techniques with this full color guide Key FeaturesLearn how to acquire and process textual data and visualize the key findingsObtain deeper insight into the most commonly used algorithms and techniques and understand their tradeoffsImplement models for solving real-world problems and evaluate their performanceBook Description With the ever-increasing demand for machine learning and programming professionals, it's prime time to invest in the field. This book will help you in this endeavor, focusing specifically on text data and human language by steering a middle path among the various textbooks that present complicated theoretical concepts or focus disproportionately on Python code. A good metaphor this work builds upon is the relationship between an experienced craftsperson and their trainee. Based on the current problem, the former picks a tool from the toolbox, explains its utility, and puts it into action. This approach will help you to identify at least one practical use for each method or technique presented. The content unfolds in ten chapters, each discussing one specific case study. For this reason, the book is solution-oriented. It's accompanied by Python code in the form of Jupyter notebooks to help you obtain hands-on experience. A recurring pattern in the chapters of this book is helping you get some intuition on the data and then implement and contrast various solutions. By the end of this book, you'll be able to understand and apply various techniques with Python for text preprocessing, text representation, dimensionality reduction, machine learning, language modeling, visualization, and evaluation. What you will learnUnderstand fundamental concepts of machine learning for textDiscover how text data can be represented and build language modelsPerform exploratory data analysis on text corporaUse text preprocessing techniques and understand their trade-offsApply dimensionality reduction for visualization and classificationIncorporate and fine-tune algorithms and models for machine learningEvaluate the performance of the implemented systemsKnow the tools for retrieving text data and visualizing the machine learning workflowWho this book is for This book is for professionals in the area of computer science, programming, data science, informatics, business analytics, statistics, language technology, and more who aim for a gentle career shift in machine learning for text. Students in relevant disciplines that seek a textbook in the field will benefit from the practical aspects of the content and how the theory is presented. Finally, professors teaching a similar course will be able to pick pertinent topics in terms of content and difficulty. Beginner-level knowledge of Python programming is needed to get started with this book.

Cinema has been long associated with France, dating back to 1895, when Louis and Auguste Lumi_re screened their works, the first public viewing of films anywhere. Early silent pioneers Georges MZli_s, Alice Guy BlachZ and others followed in the footsteps of the Lumi_re brothers and the tradition of important filmmaking continued throughout the 20th century and beyond. In Encyclopedia of French Film Directors, Philippe Rège identifies every French director who has made at least one feature film since 1895. From undisputed masters to obscure one-timers, nearly 3,000 directors are cited here, including at least 200 filmmakers not mentioned in similar books published in France. Each director's entry contains a brief biographical summary, including dates and places of birth and death; information on the individual's education and professional training; and other pertinent details, such as real names (when the filmmaker uses a pseudonym). The entries also provide complete filmographies, including credits for feature films, shorts, documentaries, and television work. Some of the most important names in the history of film can be found in this encyclopedia, from masters of the Golden Age_Jean Renoir and RenZ Clair_to French New Wave artists such as Fran_ois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

'I've long wished perfumery to be taken seriously as an art, and for scent critics to be as fierce as opera critics, and for the wearers of certain "fragrances" to be hissed in public, while others are cheered. This year has brought Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which I breathed in, rather than read, in one delighted gulp.' Hilary Mantel, Guardian Perfumes: The Guide is the culmination of Turin's lifelong obsession and rare scientific flair and Sanchez's stylish and devoted blogging about every scent that she's ever loved and loathed. Together they make a fine and utterly persuasive argument for the unrecognised craft of perfume-making. Perfume writing has certainly never been this honest, compelling or downright entertaining.

Georges Perec, novelist, filmmaker and essayist, was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work is its intrinsically geographical nature. With major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban and architectural concerns, both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, homes and apartments, and in a methodological way, experimenting with methods of urban exploration and observation, classification, enumeration and taxonomy.