On July 14, 1853, the four warships of America's East Asia Squadron made for Kurihama, 30 miles south of the Japanese capital, then called Edo. It had come to pry open Japan after her two and a half centuries of isolation and nearly a decade of intense planning by Matthew Perry, the squadron commander. The spoils of the recent Mexican SpanishAmerican War had whetted a powerful American appetite for using her soaring wealth and power for commercial...
On one level this remarkable book will provide invaluable background for anyone interested in understanding why Japan's love-hate relationship with the United States continues to this day. It should also serve to underline the dangers of imposing one nation's views on another. But the book will also appeal to readers simply interested in a rich historical tour of Japan at the dawn of its modern era. The skillful weaving of...
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This challenging and deeply researched book on Perry's "opening up" of Japan has the most painful relevance possible to our current government's colossal misadventure in allegedly trying to bring "Freedom and Democracy" to a land of darker-skinned people about whose history we are -- not willfully mis- informed, which would be bad enough, but wildly, tragically ignorant. And what kind of reverberations can we expect, decades...
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Early on in his excellent history of Commodore Perry's deliberate and U.S. sanctioned effort to spread the gospel according to American interests in mid-19th century Japan, George Feifer has this to say: "Like the overwhelming majority of his fellows, the Commodore had a penchant for criticizing other societies while remaining silent about the flaws of his own. The notion of a Japanese squadron sailing into the Chesapeake...
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In 1853, in one of America's earliest demonstrations of its willingness to flex its muscles internationally, President Fillmore sent Perry to Japan to open an exotic ancient country to diplomacy and trade. Less than 90 years later, the Japanese invaded us. Obviously, between these two momentous happenings, there there were thousands of other intervening events which contributed to the forming of Japanese-American relations...
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Commodore Perry's opening of Japan is an event that has faded somewhat in U.S. history, coming as it did in the years before the Civil War and well before the fateful attack on Pearl Harbor. But Feifer's scholarly, yet entertaining telling of the events deserves the attention of anyone who enjoys a good historical yarn or who seeks a better understanding of U.S. history in general. Feifer's Breaking Open Japan is both...
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Our newest survey with OnePoll asked 2,000 U.S. parents and their kids about their reading habits, popular and classic books, and summer reading assignments. The story we uncovered offered a few surprises.
David Baldacci's newest book, A Calamity of Souls, comes out April 16 and it's already generating some major buzz. Ten years in the writing, this novel may represent a bit of a passion project for Baldacci who says it incorporates some elements from his own life. Read on to learn more and get recommendations for similar reads.
As long as there have been books, there have been women writers, but until the last few centuries, their voices were marginalized, discounted, and even silenced. Finally, this is changing. In celebration of Women's History Month, here are 21 time-honored classics by women who broke new ground and earned their spot in literary history.
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