Michel Odent

Advantages: Loads of great information and gives you confidence
Disadvantages: None

...In this day and age we tend to think of a hospital birth with lots of drugs as the normal and correct thing but there are so many alternatives out there, yes there is always pain but it is only for a very short space of time in comparison to your life, you know that it will end and best of all you will have a fabulous baby at the end. When you register at the hospital in the early days of pregnancy you are usually lead to think that hospital and drugs is the only way to go, when I asked about home birth the hospital didn’t know what to say they had to go away, get me a phone number and a leaflet, and that was a large maternity hospital! Anyway home birth was not to be for me due to complications but there are still loads of other options. When I was pregnant I heard about a Frenchman called Dr Michel Odent whose philosophy... Read review

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Advantages: Informative, funny, lighthearted
Disadvantages: might make you worry as much as she does

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Advantages: Fascinating, characters seem real
Disadvantages: Paul Michel isn't real

...I've heard that after finishing Hallucinating Foucault many people have been convinced Paul Michel is a real writer, and have actually searched for his books. I can see why. Hallucinating Foucault investigates the relationship between a writer and their readers. Many argue a reader should not be concerned with the personal life of an author, but Patricia Duncker explores the mutual necessity of the relationship. The narrator is a young student at Cambridge, writing a thesis on the French author Paul Michel. He is convinced by his girlfriend that to read his work he must travel to France to find Paul Michel, committed to an asylum years before, "because…if you love someone, you know where they are, what's happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can". The book then becomes a passionate love story... Read review

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