The author of Degas in New Orleans (1997) attempts to define the nexus that arose between the US and Japan in the late 19th century by examining its effect on key cultural and social arbiters of the day.
Benfey (English/Mount Holyoke) alludes to the subject of the well-known print by Hokusai in finding that a cultural “Great Wave” from Japan loomed over the US for decades after Commodore Matthew Perry’s thinly disguised mission of intimidation in 1853. It crested following the Centennial of 1876, asserts the author, principally on New England’s shores, where wealthy, influential Boston Brahmins languished in ennui, looking for some infusion of mysticism to revive a shopworn Protestant climate. Benfey chronicles the infusion of Japan (or a least the concept of “Old Japan”) into the writings of brooding Herman Melville and quirky Lafcadio Hearn, the paintings of John LaFarge, and the collections of connoisseurs like Edward Morse and Sturgis Bigelow. On the flip side, the reader will find an account of Manjiro (a.k.a. John Mung), the castaway boy fisherman who, after being raised in Massachusetts, returned home to Japan as a champion of education in the English language, Western ideas, and modern technologies. Fortunately, these extensive documentations are often relieved with juicier bits of gossip that place, say, an enrobed Samurai gigolo—possibly bisexual, definitely an utter snob—sipping tea in a paneled drawing room on Beacon Street. Anecdotal gems such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s admission to being “bored to extinction” by the formal Japanese tea ceremony also help lighten the author’s forced march from art history through literary criticism to geopolitical ruminations. He barely notes, however, the 1905 event that signaled the unprecedented coming of age of Japanese military technology: the battle of Tsushima, during which the imperial navy destroyed the Russian fleet.
A sweeping cacophony of about a half-dozen condensed books.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50327-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Categories: HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
