French and Americans: The Other Shore

One of the many reasons why the Americans and the French, these two great people who nourish such complex feelings towards one another, have so much difficulty getting along consistently is that Americans like to do and the French are content to understand. But this is not to say that such understanding comes easily. The author, a French-born and naturalized American with extensive experience of both countries, has attempted here not only to describe the surprisingly strong differences between our two cultures, but also to explain why we are so different. For this innovative work, he mobilizes a multi-disciplinary approach to a rare degree. He gives readers from either shore an opportunity to reflect, at a truly deep level, on their own culture, in order for us to finally be able to see what we were taking for granted and to unearth the many cultural roots of our personality. The we become able to enrich our thinking and our practices with a broader stet of options. However – you have been warned – this discovery happens at the price of a certain loss of innocence: once you have read this book, there will be no way back. Dr. Baudry published the French best-seller Français et Américains, l’autre rive first in 2000, as a cyberbook (which can be downloaded free of charge at www.pbaudry.com) and then on paper (Village Mondial / Pearson Ed. Paris. 2nd edition, 2004), and finally as a comic strip, Les Frenchies, co-authored with Luc Nisset. Many of his 74,000 French-speaking readers asked him for an English translation, either to share with their American colleagues in French-American companies, to better communicate within culturally mixed couples, or to use as a reference book for Intercultural Studies, a topic that he has been teaching for many years at several of these famous institutions of higher education that the French fret soi much about. He has also given hundreds of conferences to American and French audiences, despite which he is still alive and well. “Mais bon!”