Library Journal's Reader's Shelf January 2010

Who and Why:

The Human Story Behind History

Aima(c)E & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 By Fischer, Erica Translator McCown, Edna 1998-10 - Alyson Books 9781555834500 Check Our Catalog Out of the vacuum created by history's scant attention to Nazi persecution of homosexuals comes a unique and maddeningly tragic story of love between two women of startling contrast. Aimee & Jaguar is the first book of its kind: it tells, through Rashomon-like firsthand accounts, of the horrors - and the joysshared by Felice Schragenheim, who did not survive the war, and Elisabeth Wust, who lived to finally tell their story after more than fifty years of silence. Aimee & Jaguar is set against a compelling historical backdrop of increasing pressure placed on Jews, homosexuals, and non-Aryans in Nazi Germany beginning in the early 1930s. …More

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan By Benfey, Christopher E. G. Author Benfey, Christopher 2004-08 - Random House Trade 9780375754555 Check Our Catalog When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to "Old Japan," with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, "A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced--Darwinians that they were--that their quarry was on the verge of extinction." These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is "shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan"; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai's daughter and becomes Japan's preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world's leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal workson Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity "seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril." "From the Hardcover edition. …More

Malinche's Conquest By Lanyon, Anna 2000-05 - Allen & Unwin Academic 1864487801 Check Our Catalog Malinche was the Amerindian translator for Hernan Cortes -- from her lips came the words that triggered the downfall of the great Aztec Emperor Moctezuma in the Spanish Conquest of 1521. In Mexico, Malinche's name is synonymous with "traitor", yet folklore and legend still celebrate her mystique. The author traverses Mexico and delves into the country's extraordinary past to excavate the mythologies of this exceptional woman's life. Malinche -- abandoned to strangers as a slave when just a girl -- was taken by Cortes to become interpreter, concubine, witness to his campaigns, mother to his son, yet married to another. She survived unimaginably precarious times relying on her intelligence, courage, and gift for language. Though Malinche's words changed history, her own story remained untold, until now. …More

When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes By Feldman, Jay 2005-03 - Free Press 9780743242783 Check Our Catalog A BookPage Notable Title Feldman chronicles how the most powerful series of earthquakes in American history reversed the flow of the Mississippi River, uncovered a seamy murder, and altered the course of the War of 1812. Line drawings throughout. of photos. …More

The Return of Martin Guerre By Davis, Natalie Zemon 1984-10 - Harvard University Press 9780674766914 Check Our Catalog The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400 years ago. Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien r& eacute; gime, and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued villageimpostor, a rare identification across class lines. Deftly written to please both the general public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying begins. …More