Kodansha globe

This is the intimate and inspiring story of one of the truly great cosmopolitans of our time. During an exceptional career spanning five decades, Donald Keene has brought the works of Japan's greatest writers to worldwide attention through his highly acclaimed writings, translations, and anthologies. On Familiar Terms is the deeply personal story of his remarkable life - from a Depression-era childhood through his wartime experiences as a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific, his early enchantment with the now-vanished world of old Kyoto, and the diverse and lasting friendships he made in New York, Japan, and England. In this poignant and engaging portrait of intellectual, spiritual, and personal growth, Donald Keene recalls his lifelong journey, including fascinating relationships with and illuminating anecdotes about such writers as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. This is a story of universal interest, of self-discovery among shifting cultural boundaries, and the making of a committed internationalist against the backdrop of a complex and restless world.

The classic 1930s travel adventures of Osa and Martin Johnson as they photograph, and eventually film, their way through darkest Africa and the treacherous cannibal islands of the South Pacific.

x, 288 p. ; 22 cm

A very young Thor Heyerdahl sets out with his new wife for paradise - a natural and unspoiled world that they sought and, to a degree, found in the South Pacific. It was the first of many journeys that would lead to expeditions and explorations, to a vocation, to the testing of theories against the currents of oceans and history, to books that would include Kon-Tiki, Aku-Aku, and Easter Island, and would bring him worldwide fame and renown. This warm, spirited, amusing memoir of Heyerdahl's youth is the key to his future life. We see the early emergence of certain of his basic ideas and beliefs: that ancient man, previously believed to he primitive and confined by the oceans, knew more and traveled farther than had been suspected; that the natural world was even then endangered and was well worth preserving; that individuals and peoples could live peacefully together, find common problems and uncommon joys. This is a love story, an adventure story, a documentary based on journals the young Thor kept at the time, and a prophet's brief but unrestrained, unabashed sermon-polemic on why the seas, like the cities, should no longer be unthinkingly polluted in the pursuit of profits, and why the contempt for nature is as much a crime against the planet as a capital offense against humanity.

Two and a half million Americans - fifty-five million people worldwide - stutter. Though their baffling malady has been subjected to endless analysis for over 2,500 years, most endure it without hope of a cure. The very anticipation of stuttering can dominate a victim's social and emotional life. If the majority suffer in anonymity, famous figures down through the ages - Moses, Charles I, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, W. Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, and Marilyn Monroe among them - have also known the isolation and trauma of living with knotted tongues. Indeed, Charles Dickens once aptly described stuttering as "a barrier by which the sufferer feels that the world without is separated from the world within." In this fascinating and original social history, which combines literary scholarship with historical research, Benson Bobrick explores one of the great conundrums of medical history, its impact on the lives of the afflicted, and the astonishing therapeutic practices it has spawned. Demosthenes was obliged to labor up steep inclines with lead plates strapped to his chest and to declaim over the roar of the ocean with pebbles in his mouth; one 16th-century Italian physician prescribed nosedrops combining beetroot and coriander to help "dehumidify" the brain; and a Native American tribe had stutterers spit through a hole in a board "to get the devil out of their throats." At one time or another, stuttering has been popularly traced to childhood trauma; sibling rivalry; suppressed anger; infantile sexual fixations; deformations of the tongue, lips, or jaw; chemical imbalance; strict upbringing; vicious habit; guilt; approach-avoidance conflicts; and so on, and has been treated by hypnosis, drugs, conditioning, electric shock, and of course, psychoanalysis. Mounting clinical evidence today, however, indicates that stuttering is a neurological problem, possibly involving anomalies of sound transmission through the skull. Genetic research suggests a familial link. While a definitive cure remains elusive, certain therapeutic techniques are effective, as the author explains in a compelling account of his own successful quest for deliverance.

Zhou Enlai was one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century. Long overshadowed by the more visible - and charismatic - Mao Dzedong, he and his life and extraordinary accomplishments remain little recognized outside China, where he is still revered as the beloved father of the modern nation. In Eldest Son, Han Suyin brings this towering figure to life in a profoundly human and intimate portrait - the first full-scale biography of the late premier to be published in English. Between 1956 and 1974, Dr. Han conducted a series of eleven unprecedented interviews with Zhou, each of them lasting for several hours. Drawing upon these encounters, and on further meetings with his widow, his family and colleagues, as well as her unusual access to the Communist Party archives, Dr. Han presents a nuanced portrait of this deeply committed Chinese nationalist and Communist. Here is the full sweep of Zhou's remarkable life: his early schooling in Japan and Europe, his complex and loyal relationship to Mao, his historic meetings with other world leaders such as Khrushchev, Nehru, and Nixon which opened China to the global community. And Dr. Han gives us the private man as well as the public figure: his loving and formative marriage to Deng Yingchao, the murder of his adopted daughter at the hands of the Red Guards, and ultimately his painful battle with cancer . Like no other, Zhou's life is the history of modern China. Through the lens of his experience we see unfolding the dramatic, sometimes violent, decades of change: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the galvanizing Long March, the social convulsions of the Great Leap Forward, the violent excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and the diplomatic rapprochement with the West in the 1970s. Dr. Han weaves these decisive events with the impressions and memories of hundreds of ordinary citizens from every sector of Chinese society to create a rich historical tapestry. Compellingly written, unique in its perspective, Eldest Son is masterful social history and an indispensable portrait of a legendary leader whose political legacy continues to influence the course of China today.