Mémoires le voleur dans la maison vide [French]

I have long enjoyed Revel's perspective, which really is hard to define: he is at once of the left and yet a relentless critic of European pretention of a monopoly on progressivism. His sarcasm is so biting, his vision so clear - if often dead flat wrong as when he predicted the Soviet Union would win the cold war - that I have been entertained as much as I have learned from reading his books and columns. His is a truly great writer.With this book, you get to know that man and his times. WHile brilliant and capable of incredible discipline, he lets on that he was not a serious student and hence was not made of the stuff of academics. Because I like him, I enjoyed learning all the details of his life, from his beginnings in Marseille, to his entry into the Ecole Normale - where Sartre and Aron studied with many of the most eminent French writers of the 20C - to his briliant career as a journalist. He did very interesting things, from introducing Luis Bunuel's Mexican period to a mass audience to helping the writer of Papillon to become a household name in the 197os to hanging out with opium smokers in the Hotel Regina in the 1950s (the first hotel I stayed in in Paris and so a special treat). Of course, he was also in the French resistance in a minor way! You read of the genesis of his many books, which included philosophy, lit crit, political polemics, gastronomy, and many other subjects. Then there is his combat as an editor of the distinguished weekly magazine L'Express with the ideologically rigid extreme left, which he takes up with the most remarkable gusto and humor. This can serve as a history of the political ideas of the second half of the 20C with a perspective that many Americans will enjoy, admire, and undersatnd, which these days is more difficult than one would care to imagine. I read in on moving back to Europe after an absence of 15 years and enjoyed every single page.Warmly recommended.