Books: In Creation's Seventh Day

FRANCE AGAINST HERSELF (476 pp.) —Herbert Luefhy—Praeger ($6.50).

This is a book for all those who, like Thomas Jefferson, think of France as every man's second country. A Swiss journalist who has lived for ten years in Paris, Herbert Luethy, 37, writes about France with caustically earnest and wide-ranging impartiality, a depth of historical per spective, and a total absence of lecturing, hectoring or sentimentalizing. Luethy calls his book "an attempt to draw up an inventory of what has survived, and also of what has become ossified, in the France of the present day." Though his portentous paradoxes are far from...