Women and men

During the course of a single summer in Paris, in the shade of a fig tree, a journalist and a philosopher meet to participate in an age-old pastime: the contemplation of love. The result is Women and Men, a book about the relationship between the sexes, but more than that, a book about the nature of longing and the character of the human heart. In ten provocative discussions - presented here exactly as they occurred - Francoise Giroud and Bernard-Henri Levy wrestle with human history's most powerful preoccupations, questions and yearnings which have animated lovers since the beginning of time, inspiring symphonies, volumes of poetry, masterpieces of art and literature, even wars. How do we love those we love, and what are the bounds of passion? What, finally, is the nature of desire, what do we most hunger for, most need? The mysteries of romantic love yield themselves up to thrilling scrutiny in these dialogues: seduction, eroticism, the power of beauty, the problem of jealousy, the struggle for fidelity, the wish for pure rapture, and the enduring belief in eternal love. Drawing easily and usefully on an astonishing knowledge of intellectual history - using Stendhal, Proust, Freud, Sartre, and many more as touchstones for their ideas and intuitions - Giroud and Levy achieve a conversational depth and insight in these pages that is a joy to witness, a pleasure to over-hear. Their meditations on love and on the mighty and sometimes mystifying appetites of the human heart and body are both tremendously edifying and great fun.