Four books attempt to explain our seemingly endless need to decode the French and why...depicted...as an especially exotic species

from FinancialTimes:
Musician John Dummer stopped drinking a decade ago and moved with his wife to the Chalosse, a sleepy region east of Bordeaux, to set up as antiques dealers. He is taken under the wing of a fellow brocanteur called, he swears, Serge Bastarde. In Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette, Dummer describes a very different France from that of Simkins, Wheeler and the rest – a land of dirt and poverty, alienation and thievery. Bastarde certainly lives up to his surname, cruising the countryside in his battered van trying to cheat clueless peasants out of their heirlooms.