Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone - Couverture rigide

Parry, Richard Lloyd

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0374253978 ISBN 13 : 9780374253974

Editeur : McD, 2017

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"Every time I think of it, I’m filled with wonderment (and, I suppose, professional envy). Lloyd Parry is such a good reporter: discreet yet unsentimental; ever-present, but able also swiftly to absent himself from the page... This book is a future classic of disaster journalism, up there with John Hersey’s Hiroshima." (Rachel Cooke Observer)

"It is a breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction that movingly captures the stupefying effects of ruin; the numb interstice of bereavement. Parry’s previous book, People Who Eat Darkness (2010), was the result of his ten-year investigation into the disappearance of Lucie Blackman... Ghosts of the Tsunami possesses that same combination of haunting narrative and deep sociological insight... Parry writes with great fluency and timing, like a novelist alternating cadences and withholding information from the reader so as to create moments of tension and surprise. And there is something of the folklorist in the way he discusses the tradition of ghost stories in places such as Tohoku and Sendai." (Gavin Jacobson Times Literary Supplement)

"A compassionate and piercing look at the communities ravaged by the tsunami, which claimed more than 99% of the day’s casualties of 18,500 – the greatest single loss of life in Japan since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki... Nothing symbolised such failures better than the case of Okawa primary school, whose story is one of the engines powering this book, giving it the character of a finely conceived crime fiction or a psychological drama... Tragic, engrossing." (Eri Hotta Guardian)

"In still, novelistic prose, he rescues from the depths of the ocean and the foul-smelling mud the lives that were ended on that day... Parry’s self-described purpose is to shake off detachment and to seek to imagine ― really imagine ― events so horrible that we take refuge in the trope that they are unimaginable. But there is an equal and opposite force in his remarkable treatment, which is to study the misery of tragedy from a safe distance... Parry, a journalist and long-time Tokyo resident, is able to draw something meaningful, even lovely, from the well of misery... Overall, the strength of the book lies in its stories, its observations and its language... The language is daring throughout." (David Pilling Financial Times)

"Ghosts of the Tsunami is alert to the social and political ramifications and transfixed by the spectral quality of the post-disaster landscape... These twin streams – one universal, the other intensely particular – come together in the mystery that is at this book’s core... Some of his most fascinating chapters take in the disaster’s psychological aftermath... It is full of stories of human endeavor, of individual and collective triumph over well-nigh insuperable odds... As well as being full of ghosts, Lloyd Parry’s A-grade reportage is also full of metaphors." (D. J. Taylor The Times)

"Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year." (Economist)

"A remarkable and deeply moving book - describing in plain and perfect prose the almost unimaginable devastation and tragedy of the Japanese tsunami." (Henry Marsh)

"Ghosts of the Tsunami is enthralling and deeply moving, fully conveying and involving the reader in the sheer horror and tragedy of all that happened yet with such beauty, honesty and sincerity. Richard Lloyd Parry has returned the trust and done justice to the victims and their families a hundredfold.’" (David Peace)

"A stunning book from the man who has a strong claim to be the most compelling non-fiction writer in the world." (Johann Hari)

"When Lloyd Parry wrote Ghosts of the Tsunami, he was seeking “the gift of imagination...the paradoxical capacity to feel tragedy on the surface of the skin, in all its cruelty and dread, but also to understand it...with calm and penetration”. It is to his great credit that, once he attained this gift, he so generously shared it with us here. " (Yo Zushi New Statesman)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.

It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis, and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo, and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings. He met a priest who performed exorcisms on people possessed by the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village which had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own.

What really happened to the local children as they waited in the school playground in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?

Ghosts of the Tsunami is a classic of literary non-fiction, a heart-breaking and intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the personal accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the bleak struggle to find consolation in the ruins.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: McD
• Date d'édition: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0374253978
• ISBN 13: 9780374253974
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 295