This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar/critic of matters French (and a key figure in the naturalization of French "theory" in English) than a series of differently angled fragments, episodes, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called his "amour vache," his injured and occasionally injurious love, for France and the French.

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He is the author of eight books, including Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years (1993), Genealogies of the Text (1995), and Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944 (2000).