After an apprenticeship as a shipwright, William Adams takes to the sea in 1587, at age 23, commanding a supply ship carrying food and ammunition to the English fleet as it battles the Spanish Armada. A dozen years later he is commanding a ship going to the Spice Islands on a route around South America. At the end of nineteen catastrophic months, the 36-year-old Adams and twenty-four desperately ill and dying crew members arrive at the south end of Japan, the first Englishmen ever to do so. Giles MIlton writes an extremely readable, scholarly study of the opening (and in 1637, the closing) of Japan to western trade. Using many primary sources, Milton creates an exciting story of how Japan comes to be “discovered,” what its values and culture are, and why the intrusion of the west and the possibility of trade are eventually rebuffed. The contrasts Milton sets up throughout the biography attest to his appreciation of 17th century Japanese society and their superior “civilization” to that of the British at the time.
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When three-year-old Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 – 1824) goes suddenly and completely blind one night as she sleeps, there is no dearth of physicians willing to treat her. Empress Maria Theresia of Austria immediately provides all the resources of the court – and of her court physicians. French author/journalist Michele Halberstadt creates a fascinating study of the young pianist, whose blindness has been diagnosed by court physicians as amaurosis, a form of blindness “that appears suddenly without any malfunctioning of the optical system. Its onset is either toxic, congenital, or nervous.” Certainly there is a chance that this wis a kind of hysterical blindness, caused by some trauma, perhaps within her family, but Sigmund Freud and his theories, are still a hundred years in the future, and there appears to be no way, at that time, to discover what it is that is blocking her sight. When Maria Theresia is eighteen, Franz Anton Mesmer, meets her father, and a “cure” begins.
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If ever there were anyone who had an excuse to grind axes, it would be Eva Gabrielsson, who lived with author Stieg Larsson for thirty-two years but who, through a loophole in Swedish law, inherited nothing upon his death at age fifty in November, 2004, his entire estate going, by law, to his estranged brother and father. Gabrielsson has said many times, and repeats often throughout this book, that she is not personally interested in the enormous sums which the posthumous sales of his Millenium Trilogy have generated—forty million books sold, plus rights to audiobooks and films, including three Swedish films and one American film not yet released. As dedicated to social causes as Larsson was, she is fighting, instead, for control of his literary legacy, especially alarmed because “a myth has sprung up: the ‘Millennium Stieg’…[which] casts him as the hero of the trilogy…[though] Stieg didn’t wait for the Millennium books to be what he was.”
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In this newly reprinted book from 1998, William Boyd details the life and work of Nat Tate, an artist whose work became highly sought-after in the 1950s. One of the Abstract Expressionists in New York City during that decade, he could usually be found at his studio in the heart of the art district, at galleries, in conversation with Gore Vidal, Frank O’Hara or Peggy Guggenheim, or drinking with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others at the Cedar Tavern on University Place. He traveled to Europe in 1959 and visited Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who became his idol. Every one of his paintings sold almost immediately, most of them before the scheduled gallery openings even took place. His most famous work consisted of over two hundred pen-and-ink drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge, in honor of his favorite poet Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” cycle, and he had started a new series, also honoring Crane, called “White Buildings.” Then, unexpectedly, in January, 1960, at age thirty-one, Nat Tate committed suicide. Later, his entire reputation would be questioned.
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Author Tierno Monenembo recreates the story of Aime Olivier de Sanderval, an almost forgotten Frenchman who followed a childhood dream by going to remote Africa in 1879, describing Olivier’s experiences in Guinea just before it became an unwilling colony of France. Olivier was not representing the government when he arrived in Guinea and did not believe in colonization in the traditional sense. An explorer with an almost mystical sense of destiny, he wanted to build a railroad from the beautiful hill country in the center of the country to the coast so that he could create trading posts and ultimately claim for himself the plateau of Fouta Djallon, “a land of rushing water and fruit, pure milk and wise men! The land that quenches your thirst.” The realities of tribal Guinea, with its internecine wars, its completely different cultures, and its total connection to the land intrude immediately upon his arrival, however. Naively, he tries to befriend the various groups and the leaders that he meets as he travels from the coast to central Guinea, but he has no conception of the long, historical rivalries among groups, of their experiences with previous white visitors, or of their ways of governing.
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