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93 books match the query 'Paris' and 2 start with o

cover of One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery

One Hour in Paris

A True Story of Rape and Recovery

Karyn L. Freedman

University of Chicago Press, 2014

In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape. One Hour in Paris takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspirational journey through suffering and recovery both personal and global. We follow Freedman from an apartment in Paris to a French courtroom, then from a trauma center in Toronto to a rape clinic in Africa. At a time when as many as one in three women in the world have been victims of sexual assault and when many women are still ashamed to come forward, Freedman’s book is a moving and essential look at how survivors cope and persevere.

At once deeply intimate and terrifyingly universal, One Hour in Paris weaves together Freedman’s personal experience with the latest philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological insights on what it means to live in a body that has been traumatized. Using her background as a philosopher, she looks at the history of psychological trauma and draws on recent theories of posttraumatic stress disorder and neuroplasticity to show how recovery from horrific experiences is possible. Through frank discussions of sex and intimacy, she explores the consequences of sexual violence for love and relationships, and she illustrates the steep personal cost of sexual violence and the obstacles faced by individual survivors in its aftermath. Freedman’s book is an urgent call to face this fundamental social problem head-on, arguing that we cannot continue to ignore the fact that sexual violence against women is rooted in gender inequalities that exist worldwide—and must be addressed.

One Hour in Paris is essential reading for survivors of sexual violence as well as an invaluable resource for therapists, mental health professionals, and family members and friends of victims.
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cover of Operatic Infrastructures: Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York

Operatic Infrastructures

Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New York

Flora Willson

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.

At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera’s roots in the material worlds of these cities. Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, she investigates the physical underpinnings of opera at the century’s end as an inter-urban, multimedia network. 


Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clichés of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera’s own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890s—making it impossible to demarcate neatly between “opera” and its “context.” Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.

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