1 comments about We Refused To Die: My time as a prisoner of war in Bataan and Japan, 1942-1945.

1. This book was beautiful! American history was recorded so well by the author it made you feel his hunger! I gave this book to my grandfather, who is a WWII vet, and I plan on having my children read it. Amazing!

No comments about Mirei Shigemori - Rebel in the Garden: Modern Japanese Landscape Architecture.

No comments about Los Angeles's Boyle Heights (Images of America).

No comments about Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan.

2 comments about Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain.

1. Authors are often advised to "write what you know" but when a Japanese artist in the 19th century defied convention to paint the familiar - - the humblest of peasants, 'fragrant' laborers in fish markets - - wealthy patrons would not buy his art. However, Hokusai persisted and his influence has been phenomenal. He used more than thirty other names in his lifetime. The name "Hokusai" was adopted officially when he was 36 years old. It meant *North Star Studio." Hokusai was a Buddhist and believed that the constellations had the power to guide him. His art was his 'North Star' I believe, or his sun or moon? Sometimes we read about persons that we *ache* to have known; Hokusai was such a person for me.
   
   Amazingly he changed his place of residence more than ninety times. Every morning he sketched a *lion-dog* for good luck. It may have had something to do with his longevity; he did not die until he was in his ninetieth year! He painted often the actors in the Noh theatre, and the more plebeian Kabuki plays. Those flamboyant actors leant themselves to portraiture that easily found buyers. His woodcut "The Great Wave off Kanegawa" (reproduced in Ray's book) has probably been "altered" or used for cartoons, t-shirts, etc., as often as Grant Wood's "American Gothic."
   
   Can any of us imagine composing over 30,000 works of art in a lifetime? Hokusai claimed he drew nothing of great note before the age of 70. He called himself *Gakyo Rojin* which translates "old man mad about painting." As mentioned, his 'output' was prodigious. His mother died when he was six years old. She had promised to take him on a pilgrimage to Mt. Fuji, and his fascination for the mountain never waned. Cherry trees bloomed like billowing clouds on the pilgrims' path in his paintings. I would have thought him too busy and/or preoccupied to have a wife but he did, and they had three children.
   
   Ray's own illustrations are strong in outline & rich colors and happily complement the text and Hokusai's own sketches from his *MANGA* shown in the book's endpapers - - All are an excellent introduction to Hokusai's art. It is a children's biography well-designed for all ages to learn from and savor. Reviewer mcHAIKU highly recommends Deborah Kogan Ray's book for generational sharing. Even though our language is not represented by 'pictographs' some children might be inspired to make their own penmanship more legible - - even artistic!



2. This story of a famous Japanese artist (1760-1849) is beautifully written and illustrated. It is a story of rising beyond the limitations of class, of educating oneself through persistence and hard work, and of not being confined by the narrow views of others to reach one's potential. Katsushik Hokusai influenced the work of Western Impressionists artists. This is a book not to be missed if you are studying this prolific artist.

3 comments about American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (Memories of War).

1. Mr. Hilsman's story begins with his life prior to enlisting and moves a little slowly to finally reach the action portion of the book. Still, the story is quite entertaining. The early background of his family and experiences of youth are good character-building for what follows. I had expected more action earlier on in the book and I thought it took a while to get to that part of the book but overall it was a good story. If you are looking for the action, skip the first few chapters and get right to the part where he joins the OSS. If you enjoy getting to know your character, stick with it through the beginning and you will be rewarded with sharing his adventures in the end.



2. there are books like this one, perhaps now merely for those who are academically interested in the subject of the World War.
   
   Hilsman has a casual and elegant style of writing, his narrative is filled with marvelous details, he has an unerring memory (how I wonder, this book was written many years after his war experience). Here you meet some of the characters from your history books, and learn how they were viewed by their men and their soliders (Stillwell, Seagrave, Merrill).
   
   It's a forgotten part of WWII history, and the American soldiers who sweated and steamed in the tropical jungles of Burma find little acknowledgement in any contemporary war talk. So here is an exquisite reminder.
   
   Hilsman writes with heart too--he reminds us that even armies defending or attacking each other in foreign lands have to behave with dignity and respect toward those who are native to the land.
   
   The book is in many ways an intensely personal narrative, but it's strength and beauty lies in the retelling of a part of the war not often remembered today. Good job, Mr. Hilsman!



3. The author went on to have a long and noted career as an academic and government official. He was chief of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and the Assistant Secretary of State during the Johnson administration.
   Roger Hilsman graduated from The US Military Academy in 1944 and was assigned to the OSS, Sent to Burma, the author commanded a guerrilla battalion, ambushing Japanese patrols, blowing up bridges, spying on the enemy, and slipping back into the teeming jungle. later he went to the prison camp in Manchuria where the Japanese had held his father and helped liberate him.
   This is an articulate and informative memoir. In the course of his career the author has written many political and policy books. This gives a sense of the man behind the job.

1 comments about The MUSIC OF LIGHT: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF HIKARI AND KENZABURO OE.

1. This is the best book I've read this year. It covers so much: a family's love for their brain damaged child and their commitment to the grueling, challenging years raising him in a society that wants him to just disappear. It is at once literary criticism, classical music criticism, cultural commentary, biography, pschology, psychiatry, medicine and a touchingly told love story between man and son. By the end of this book you will have fallen in love with Hikari the sweet savant from Kobe and his wonderful father, Kenzaburo.

No comments about Romaji Diary and Sad Toys: And, Sad Toys (Tuttle Classics).

2 comments about The Essential Basho.

1. [Note: This review appeared July 22, 1999, in the Seattle Weekly and is available online at http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9929/books-lightfoot.shtml]

   The Essential Basho, translated by Sam Hamill. Shambhala, $25 No wonder dreams of journeys are so often associated with death. We travel to leave our lives behind - the familiar workaday parts, anyway - hoping to arrive in a Paradise where our eyes, ears, tongues, maybe even our hearts, will be startled awake. What we really want is a new self, but what we often get is more stuff -samples of a regional cuisine, eyefuls of great art, tidbits about Kafka's life in Prague, opinions, trinkets. Traveling becomes grazing on a global scale.

   A different pathway opens up in Sam Hamill's newest collection of translations, The Essential Basho. Here for the first time in a single volume is the essence of Basho's work: four travel narratives, including the best-known "Narrow Road to the Interior," and 250 haiku returning us home to a dailiness transformed by awareness and attention. Whether the poet is on the road or behind his own brushwood gate he seeks, instead of new acquisitions or excitements, an honest encounter between world and mind. These two entities were never separate to begin with. So although Basho's travelogues seem to record his treks on foot through 17th-century Japan, they're actually journeys into his own true nature, the heartland within, where self and circumstances are one.

   "Very early on the twenty-seventh morning of the third moon, under a predawn haze, transparent moon barely visible, mount Fuji just a shadow, I set out under the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. When would I see them again? A few old friends had gathered in the night and followed along far enough to see me off from the boatý I felt three thousand miles rushing through my heart, the whole world only a dream. I saw it through farewell tears.

   "Spring passes / and the birds cry out - tears / in the eyes of fishes.

   "With these first words from my brush, I started. Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler's back disappear."

   Carrying just a few necessities along with friends' farewell presents, which he can't bear to part with, Basho lets each event on the way speak the language of its particular life. At a farm he asks directions, but they're so complicated the farmer just lends Basho his horse ("'He knows the road. When he stops, get off, and he'll come back alone.'") The horse takes Basho to a village and then turns around, a gift from the poet tied to his saddle. Farther on, Basho observes peasants wearing black formal hats for ancient rites, speaks with prostitutes on a pilgrimage, sadly leaves to his fate a child abandoned by his parents, retreats from a three-day storm into a shack: Eaten alive by / lice and fleas - now the horse / beside my pillow pees.

   At a mountain temple "I crawled among boulders to make my bows at shrines. The silence was profound. I sat, feeling my heart begin to open." Elsewhere, hearing distant villagers clap wooden noisemakers to scare deer from their fields, he feels "the utter aloneness of autumn." A stranger asks for a poem ("'Something beautiful, please'") and Basho writes a verse about the cuckoo's cry that arrives, just then, from across a field.

   Basho's words flow spontaneously out of each moment lived. Instead of giving us tours or mementos of the world, he helps us open to its presences and discover who we are. Through his haiku we sense the wholeness and sufficiency of an early frost, an eggplant seed, a hangover, "Mr. Seagull," a nest of mice, a bean-floured rice ball, tears in the eyes of fishes, and ourselves, awake and alive again. Hamill frames "The Essential Basho" with essays on Basho's life and work that are scholarly enough to educate a student of haiku or Japanese culture and lively enough to engage any reader. Their depth and ease testify to the virtuosity Hamill has achieved as Editor of Copper Canyon Press, Director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, author of over thirty books, and translator of poetry in several languages. Travelers like me have carried around the world his pocket-size Basho ("Narrow Road to the Interior," now out of print) until it's tattered. We'll treasure the fine new volume silkily sleeved in Hokusai's portrait of the poet on the road again.




2. As a casual and thorough student of Basho and the Japanese poetic forms of haiku, haibun and renga I've come to believe that Sam Hamill's translations are the best ever. Hamill, as a respected poet in the English language himself, translates the Japanese of Basho into an American English that literally sings.His translation of the opening lines of "Narrow Road to the Interior," included in this volume, is a classic Basho, and classic Hamill: "The moon and the sun are eternal travelers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." I have carried Hamill's translation of "Narrow Road" with me for years. To have "The Essential Basho" now on my shelf is an event to celebrate.

5 comments about Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945.

1. Talk about one's world being turned upside down. One moment four young military doctors are enjoying good marriages and pleasant military postings in exotic locations, and in the next they are thrust in the midst of horrific battle and subsequently imprisoned under grotesquely inhumane conditions. That these men were able to endure such horrid conditions and go on to live important, useful, satisfying lives is awe inspiring.
   
   In light of Japanese Premier Abe's recent denials of Japanese Imperial Army atrocities concerning so-called "Comfort Women," this reading takes on special significance. This story is further evidence of the shameful brutality foisted by Japan during its brutal and unprovoked aggressions during the 1932-1945 wars it foisted upon its much weaker Asian neighbors and, ultimately and self-defeatingly, with the U.S. and its allies.
   
   If you can find the CD version of this book on tape, it is well worth purchasing. The narration is superb.
   
   --Bill Todd-Mancillas
   Communication Studies
   Ca. St. Univ. at Chico



2. I had seen this story on cable and bought the book afterwards. It is a very moving story and written so well. I have to say I am ashamed of the way the US treated these people during their horrible ordeal.



3. The title and synopsis of "Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945" led me to beleive that I would read about the in-depth personal experience of four US doctors as P.O.W.s. However, the book does not read like a memior or biography, but rather like any third-person account written by a historian from a distant vantage point.
   
   That is not to say that "Conduct Under Fire" is a bad book, but the fact that the title men are hardly mentioned throughout the greater part of the book is a serious flaw. John Glusman does provide the reader with background information of the four doctors, one of which is father, Murray Glusman. Unfortunately, the details of the doctor's personal experiences were infrequent once the book covered the time frame of World War II. In fact, I could not help but wonder if the author's research into his father's time as P.O.W. was limited to rummaging through sparse stash of old letters and a fireside chat with his old man. Glusman (the author) does record the harsh condition of Japanese P.O.W. camps for American troops based on the writings of others, but the reader is left to assume that the doctors' tenure as P.O.W.s was identical to that experienced by thousands of other American P.O.W.s. While it the suffering they endured at the hands of Japanese was certainly horrific and they deserve our respect, "Conduct Under Fire" lacks a unique element that could have distinguished it from numerous of other P.O.W. books.
   
   If you are simply looking for an account of Japanese prisoner camps or even of the struggle against Imperial Japan, then "Conduct Under Fire" is worth the time. Glusman does give remarkable detail to the pre-war climate in the Phillipines and Shanghai, the seige of Bataan and Corrigedor, the American submarine campaign that strangled Japanese shipping, and the B-29 raids that led to massive firebombings and yes, the atomic bombs.
   
   Although "Conduct Under Fire" promised to deliver an account of the war through the eyes of the author's father and three other doctors, the reader is left with text that could have been placed by a historian far removed from the horror.



4. This book is terrific. It is a well researched piece of scholarship and heartfelt. The author is not judgmental towards the Japanese despite their treatment of his father. As a result, the author's descriptions of the Americans "conduct under fire" shows how brave they really were.
   I could not help but get angry when I read that these men have had no proper compensation for their loss or even an apology from the Japanese government.



5. A half-century after the end of World War II we now see an extraordinary tide of books revealing the under-side of the conflict. The passing of time, the opening of previously restricted documentation, and a less romantic view of events have conspired to produce this literature. Among them are Ghost Wars, Fatal Voyage, Burma Road. These well researched volumes open to the reader the true character of war unembellished by governments eager to maintain the spin of patriotism for the sake of public morale. The latest and most formidable book in this genre is Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese (N.Y.: Penguin Group, 2005). John A. Glusman, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is the author and son of one of the four doctors. He sets the story in the larger context of the war in the Pacific so it is not simply the chronicle of medical doctors working in prisoner of war camps in the Philippines and Japan. A narrow focus would have been sufficient to describe the bravery and skill of the doctors in their years of suffering as and with POWs. But Glusman opens for the reader the larger picture of the military and political events that inevitably had a profound impact on the POWs. It was a fate of the POWs not only to deal with often sadistic Japanese captors, but they also were faced early on with the results of the U.S. failure energetically to prosecute the Pacific war in favor of the European theater, the frightful toll of more than 10,000 prisoners who died when US submarines sank Japanese ships ferrying prisoners to Japan, and the terrifying effects of fire-bombing of Japanese cities where additional POWs lost their lives. In the midst of this harrowing period, the US doctors heroically saved lives, improvised medical procedures without even minimal supplies, and managed to maintain the highest vision of their vocation. Glusman has honored his father and the thousands of POWs by telling this honest story. He also boldly reminds us all of the frightful cost of war on the human spirit in a time when inevitably warfare's result is annihilation of everything human.