Chapters: Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Michel Rocard, Louis de Funes, Jean-Claude Vannier, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Nassim Akrour, Pierre Lagaillarde, Nicolas Fabiano, Paul Giacobbi. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 57. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Louis-Ferdinand Celine was the pen name of French writer and doctor Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (27 May 1894 1 July 1961). The name "Celine" was chosen after his grandmother's first name. Celine is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and World literature. He remains, however, a controversial figure because of his satirical anti-Semitic tracts published during 1937 and the Second World War. The only child of Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Celine Guilloux, he was born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine departement (now Hauts-de-Seine). His father was a minor functionary in an insurance firm and his mother was a lacemaker. During 1905 he was awarded his Certificat d'etudes, after which he began working as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades. Between 1908 and 1910 his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment. From the time he left school, until the age of eighteen, Celine worked various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time. He often found himself working for Jewelers, first, at eleven, as an errand boy, and later as a salesperson for a local goldsmith. Although he was no longer being formally educated, he bought schoolbooks with the money he earned, and studied by himself. In 1912, at the age of eighteen, the young, self-taught, Celine took and passed the firs...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=8457