The Kiss of the Lamourette

At home in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, Robert Darnton is a shrewd and entertaining guide to the shifting borderlands of history and culture. These wide-ranging essays appear under various headings: Current Events this section includes the wonderful story of the moment in 1792 when all the delegates in the French Legislative Assembly kissed each other; Media, on television, pounding a newspaper beat, and tips to academics on how to get a book published; The Printed Word, with an essay on the history of books; The Lay of the Land, on aspects of intellectual history; and Good Neighbors, on the relation of history to literature anthropology, and the sociology of knowledge."