Lush pictures paired with fascinating facts make for a gorgeous and informative display of an enduring Japanese art form.
Brosterman charts the cultural, social, and political events of modern Japan against the evolution of sugoroku, a centuries-old traditional board game.
This collection features sugoroku boards published between the years 1870 and 1960, each elaborately illustrated along themes (from sports and exploration to folk tales and politics) that reflect its era. Alongside the colorful reprints, the author lists each game’s details (title, year, size, publisher, editor) and provides an in-depth explanation of the visuals. Discussing particularly elaborate boards that have multiple elements—such as “Developing Fortune for the Country,” a board that shows a “highly abbreviated political/military history of Japan in the Western-influenced era from 1858 until its printing in 1931”—Brosterman helpfully breaks them down into separate parts. (“Lower right corner—1858, Commodore Perry and a representative from the Japanese Shogunate sign the Harris treaty allowing commerce between the nations.”) Themes and rules vary wildly between boards, but they always relate to the events of the time. “Student’s Allowance,” for example, depicts a shopping street in Tokyo where players decide what to spend or save; it was published after the economic destruction wreaked by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The sugoroku prints are colorful, frenetic, and gorgeously detailed, with a constant sense of movement evoked by the colors and image placements. Brosterman’s explanatory text, despite a few typos, provides useful context that transforms the brilliant images into visual slices of history. A particularly compelling aspect of the book is the discovery that each era has its own unique style and emphasis—an 1899 sugoroku, for example, portrays the noble aim of the Japanese Red Cross, while a 1950s print features plenty of aliens, monsters, and spaceships representing a chaotic new world in the wake of Japan’s nuclear devastation. The interplay between art and functionality transforms these dazzling pictures into captivating cultural touchstones.
Lush pictures paired with fascinating facts make for a gorgeous and informative display of an enduring Japanese art form.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781930349339
Page Count: 99
Publisher: Kaleidograph Design
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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