Bookworm Room

Tweet (I find that I’m too thrifty not to get the most mileage out of my writing.  People who get my newsletter — and if you don’t, you can fill out the subscription form to the right — will have seen this post already, but I couldn’t resist a slightly wider audience for it.) I [...]

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Tweet Our family has traveled a great deal, but I think few trips have affected us as much as the Japan trip we took this summer.  Two things account for that:  First, we took a comprehensive tour, so we saw more than we usually see on a trip.  Second, Japan is so very different from [...]

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Tweet Spending two weeks in a country does not make one an expert on that country.  Indeed, I’m sure the opposite is true, which is that one learns just enough to be dangerous.  One sees the country without understanding it.  Nevertheless, both from looking at the Japanese in action and from speaking to myriad people, [...]

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Tweet Almost since Truman drooped the bomb, historians have been claiming that he did so, not to end World War II but, instead, to fire the opening salvo in the Cold War. In other words, the post war academics claimed that Truman sacrificed hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives just to prove a point to [...]

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Tweet I’ve been completely without Internet for the last four days. Some might find it relaxing; I found it stressful. I had this sense that the world was passing me by, without stopping for me to make comments about events. Such is the mindset of the compulsive blogger. I have Internet now, for about five [...]

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Tweet We’ve all said it at one time or another — “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” In Kyoto, though, it’s very much both the heat and the humidity. When temperatures are around 100 and humidity is around 85 or 90%, it feels as if one is moving through a giant, heated sponge. One [...]

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Tweet We spent today touring Hakone National Park, the park in which Mt. Fuji sits.  As with so many things we’ve seen in Japan, I find myself somewhat at a loss for words to describe it. The itinerary was straightforward. From our “onsen,” which is a semi-traditional hotel with a hot spring, we caught a [...]

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Tweet For me, Japan was something of a tabula rasa, as I knew little about it and had very limited expectations when I boarded the plane. So far, I’ve been charmed by what I’ve seen. I won’t make this post a travelogue, in part because it’s very hard to approach Japan that way. I already [...]

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Tweet I was discussing James Clavell’s Shogun with a friend. I have to confess here that I’ve never managed to read the book. I think the world of James Clavell, who was a Changi Prison survivor and a confirmed individualist who believed in Ayn Rand style independence.  His books are wonderfully well-informed and have fascinating [...]

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Tweet One of the best history books ever written, bar none, is Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, a book that elegantly and seamlessly manages to be a comprehensive overview of WWI from the English point of view and of British literature during WWI.  My copy of the book, which I got during [...]

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Tweet Years ago, I read in an Efraim Karsh book something to the effect that the Arab honor culture is actually a shame culture.  That is, in America, honor is a personal standard, one by which we measure ourselves.  Arab honor, however, is a public face one presents to the world.  If something goes wrong, [...]

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Tweet Mr. Bookworm, New York Times reader, was telling the children that there was a total catastrophe in Japan, with the Japanese and the world exposed to the possibility of massive radiation poisoning.  I calmed the children’s fears by telling them that the paper could be right, but it could be wrong.  First, newspapers sell [...]

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Tweet The earthquake/tsunami/potential nuclear meltdown in Japan is one of the great disasters to hit the Western world.  It’s worth remembering, however, that the media is a visual engine that lives to convey disaster. This post is an excellent antidote to that media tendency, as it carefully explains why the world is not ending in [...]

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Tweet There is a horrific story out of Japan today about a man who crashed a truck into a crowd of people, and then proceeded to complete the carnage by stabbing as many of them as possible. The story says that the man ended his spree only when surrounded by police: A witness told NHK [...]

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Tweet Norway's government earned an ugly name for itself during WWII because of the conduct of one Vidkun Quisling. He was the leader of Norway's Nazi party and, after the Germans invaded Norway, he was the Government's first leader. For the remainder of the War, Norway had a collaborationist government. Unlike their leaders, most ordinary [...]

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