Rating: 
Summary: Right on the button!
Review: I am French and I am a fan of Polly Platt's. Not only does she understand us; she helps others understand France as well. "French or Foe" is deceptively limpid, with spot-on anecdotes and a humorous tone; but it goes deep into the roots of the French psyche and French mores. Platt is affectionate but hawk-eyed. Don't ever consider moving here without this book! You'll save yourself months of misunderstandings with your neighbours, the authorities, your staff, your colleagues, shop assistants... and instead make new friends you never expected, as well as penetrate a culture very different from your own. Oh, and the drawings by Ande Grchich are truly delightful.
Rating: 
Summary: A funny and informative read
Review: With a wonderful dose of humor, Mrs. Platt has done a superb job of identifying, describing and interpreting certain behavioral traits of the French (e.g., from misinterpreted gestures to nuances in language), for a predominantly American audience. One important point that the book does not adequately emphasize, though, is the fact that all humans - throughout history, and irrespective of differences in cultural values and behavioral traits - have shared and continue to share the same basic hopes and fears. Overall, reading "French or Foe" contributed in a very significant way to my highly rewarding and very successful 'sejour' in France. Aux lecteurs Francais... Mme. Platt reussis à identifier et analyser plusieurs differences culturelles entre les Francais et les Americains. Bien que cet ouvrage est destine aux lecteurs americains, les lecteurs francais peuvent egalement beneficier des ses analyses.
Rating:
Summary: Just say "s'il vous plait!"
Review: Shortly before a 1996 vacation in Paris, I stumbled across this book in a local bookstore. The explanations of French etiquette and customs were enlightening and commonsensical, e.g., a smile is a treasure, not to be wasted on a stranger but saved for family and friends. I decided to try Ms. Platt's recommendations. They worked and how! Within a few hours of arriving at the Gare du Nord, I had been helped with my luggage from the train to the Bureau de Change, escorted to my next train, offered a ride at my destination station and lent a phone card to contact my hosts at their apartment. The most important aspect of my behavior? In approaching anyone with a question, I would say (in French of course!) "Excuse me sir, are you able to help me please? I am looking for the Bureau de Change." In fact, the French are very similar to southerners who expect some initial preliminaries before asking a direct question. Ms. Platt's book is concise, amusing, insightful and helpful with plenty of personal anecdotes that illustrate her point. In summary, a must for the traveller who wishes to enjoy France and the French!
Rating:
Summary: You too can become a Francophile.
Review: Undoubtedly Polly Platt's tome is a compilation of views and experiences garnered over several years. It makes for most enjoyable reading. From personal experience I know that the French have changed over the past 30 odd years. The smiles are really everywhere and they are most helpful. If you only remember one thing from the book, i.e. "Excusez-mois de vous deranger, mais ..." then your reading time has been well spent. Vive la France!
Rating: 
Summary: some exagerations...
Review: I met the author and it appears to me that she has had some personal problems with her first husband, who is french - and she decided to take it out in this book. Reading this book will make you biased, as she is.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining in-flight reading material
Review: An entertaining reading material on your flight to France. It helps you prepare for the unsmiling customer services at Charles de Gaulle airport, train, and subway stations around Paris. I would put the main recommendation for the book on its entertaining value, well written, and its ability retain your attention page after page.
However, following 2 years of working & living in France, I'd like to air my doubts about the accuracy of the stereotypes & the corresponding explanation given in this book: 'the math-oriented society', 'do not smile', 'blame avoidance', .... It could be an actual representation for a small minority inside French society (like in any society around the world). But from my own experience, they are mostly stereotypes, or in the best case, contains some truths, but explanation are not the actual explanation. Thus, in the end they do not help you understand, accept, and life fully in France. Instead, it amplify & justify the ingrained stereotypes you brought from home.
I would suggest instead a book by Raymonde Carroll: 'Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience'. I read the French version, so cannot comment directly on the English one. This book presents a better explanation on the actual situation, how each side looks at its own culture and scorns the other, without resorting to some fancy 'monochromatic', 'polychromatic', 'quarkchronics' terms used in French & Foe.
Rating:
Summary: French or Foe
Review: I found this book a window into a culture that I knew very little about. As I am studying in France and living there for four months, this information is helpful and concise.
Rating:
Summary: As a french citizen, I learned a lot from that book!
Review: I would consider offering this book to my french kids. Just because it is full of technical facts. Also, because when somebody from outside gives you her interpretation of your own life, it's worth reading it. Especially when this is written in good english and with a good sense of humor!
Rating:
Summary: I read this book in Napa at Domaine Chandon Winery--oui!
Review: I found this book in a secondhand bookshop and read it nonstop while waiting for my tourgroup at Domaine Chandon, a French champagne winery, in Napa, California. Part of my bus lecture had just been about the insufferably uptight and arrogant French reaction to the increased quality of California wines back in the 1960's and 1970's. I was laughing out loud reading this book. From the American tourguide's perspective, we who get busloads of miscellaneous percapita customers, this book hits the spot. The French are rare to show up on my buses because they normally speak egregiously bad English and understand even less. YEt they come as tourists and may in their stubborn confusion wind up on an English-language tour with folks from around the world,a nd with me as a tourguide. I refuse to let them get their way and make noise in the back of the bus. They always come late back, holding us all up, complain and act annoyed, and are notoriously cheap, especially in the tipping department. What these hapless and luckless tourist/victims de la belle France don't know is that I studied French for 5 years and can more or less read it. I have also spent about 3 months hitchhiking around their country with a friend, and so all in all I have an instinct for their insular selfishness, such as never admitting guilt when they return late, etc. So here's my ultimate weapon: a few threats on the microphone that it's the last time we will wait for them - en FRANCAIS! This shocks them and makes them wonder if I have understood everything they've said all along, which I haven't. I much prefer the German language and German people. If such a book would come out about the Germans, I'd get it immediately. Plott's chapter about the emphasis on a rigid, memorizing-oriented education impressed me. My opinion of the French went up when I considered what they have gone through, and theoretically know about, in contrast to grossly ignorant Yanks. YEt there's one problem in this knowledge bank: they can't share it with the world since they don't learn foreign languages; they have no patience to listen to any foreigner attempting to speak their dearly beloved and blessed French; and finally, their emotional intelligence being weak, their intellect and its great treasures are close to useless in everyday life. I admit that more and more, everyday life is working with tourists around the Bay Area on the road, in buses. We do get a lot of French busloads up in Napa, but I don't handle them. THey always say, "Yes, it iz not so bad, but France, it is better!" C'est vrai, c'est la France, toujours la meme chose!
Rating:
Summary: Out of date, not so funny
Review: As a Frenchman, I wouldn't like to be seen falling in the "cliche French" category, I am not upset to be left naked like an ageing emperor before crowds of English-speakers; I don't object to the portrait being hideous, rather I fear it is not resembling... I believe I have travelled enough, been exposed to enough alien culture to say that what I dislikle about this book is not the fact that it shows what the "funny" French are about, but the fact that it shows a partial view of a very unrepresentative bunch of French people. This book might be OK if you're planning an ethnological trip through the Heart of Dullness, Paris's posh XVIth arrondissement, it will more likely miss than hit if you go anywhere else, especially ("perish the thought!" the author might think) among the provincial hoi poloi. But France is a complex place, not one that lets itself be easily captured by anecdotes alone. On this subject I would rather advise someone who needs such a book to go for the Culture Shock series about France, it has fewer anecdotes, but it is probably more meaningful, more useful also if you consider how irrelevant some of the advices in French or Foe can be in real French life.
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