This Great Stage of Fools: An anthology of uncollected writings

Alan Booth

ISBN 10: 0989916316 / ISBN 13: 9780989916318

Edité par Bright Wave Media, 2018

304 pages. 8.23x5.83x0.71 inches. In Stock. N° de réf. du vendeur 0989916316

Synopsis :

This extraordinary book consists of a rich selection of reviews and articles Alan Booth wrote for magazines and newspapers in Japan, its topics covering Japanese film, festivals, and folk-songs. It is a remarkable volume, written with keen insight and a wickedly wry humor, a work any Japanophile will appreciate. This Great Stage of Fools, carefully edited by Booth's friend and one-time editor Timothy Harris, includes a foreword by Harris and an afterword by Karel van Wolferen.

Review:

On This Great Stage of Fools

This Great Stage of Fools includes Booth’s reviews of Japanese films, descriptions of festivals and folk songs and tales from his travels off the beaten track in Japan. (F)or anyone with an interest in Japan, or who simply enjoys colourful writing, this volume will be a treat.
Many books claim to reveal the ‘real’ or the ‘lost’ Japan, but Booth had both the ability and the personality to really get to the heart of the country. (This book) is a fitting memorial to an idiosyncratic voice.
Lesley Downer, The Literary Review, London, UK

***
Anyone who has encountered Booth’s trademark style — masking supreme erudition behind modesty, open-heartedness and pretension-puncturing wit — can only lament that there were only two major, book-length publications from that precious, unique voice..
Booth was the master of acute observation wherever he went in Japan.... (He) was for my money the greatest writer about Japan of his generation but he was also more than that, a brilliant talent who...could have gone on to write about many other cultures.
Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times, Tokyo

***
This 300-page collection of miscellaneous reviews and essays by Alan Booth...contains something for everyone. A man of immensely catholic interests, ranging from Shakespeare to modern Japanese cinema, from Japanese folk songs and festivals to the perils of Calcutta, Booth writes in a style that moves from lyrical descriptions of nature in rural Japan to devastatingly witty observations of bureaucrats, salaried men, proprietresses of out-of-the-way travelers’ inns and small town bars, and, of course, expatriates like himself.
Paul McCarthy, ACUMEN, Tokyo

***
This book is an absolute must for Booth fans. In turns fascinating and laugh-out-loud humorous, it didn’t fail to live up to very high expectations. His absence has left a huge gap in the...world of writing about Japan, and in the expectation of what might have been there is, as selfish as it may seem, an intensity of disappointment that is difficult to put into words... but also a delight in his legacy, in what has survived, as in the articles in this book through which his memory lives on.
Trevor Skingle, Diverse Japan (website)

***
(I)n his foreword to the anthology, (the editor describes) Booth’s “great intelligence, his dislike of pretension, and his grasp of social realities.”
These attributes are on display throughout the book, including in pieces like the sober portrait of blind Tsugaru-jamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan and Booth’s candid account of his knee-shattering walk across rural Shikoku. They are most poignantly apparent in the anthology’s final section, in which Booth gives a stirring account of life with cancer. Written at times from his hospital bed, it will have readers cringing at his candor and laughing at his irreverence even in the shadow of death.
James Singleton, nippon.com

***
On The Roads to Sata

Fluent in the language, well-informed and disabused, [Booth] is in the fine tradition of hard-to-please travellers like Norman Douglas, Evelyn Waugh, and V.S. Naipaul. A sharp eye and a good memory for detail... give an astonishing immediacy to his account.
The Times Literary Supplement

*
An illuminating book. The Economist

***
On Looking for the Lost

[Booth] achieved an extraordinary understanding of life as it is lived by ordinary Japanese.... Frequently brilliant in his insights.
F.G. Notehelfer, The New York Times Book Review

*
Alan Booth was not only the best travel writer on Japan, but one of the best travel writers in the English language. Looking for the Lost is a superb exercise in describing Japanese from the point of view of an outsider with the knowledge of an insider.
Ian Buruma, author of The Wages of Guilt

*
Booth had a horror of pretension.... [He] never hails to produce the whimsical anecdotes that help keep the whole account down-to-earth.
Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

*
To travel with Alan Booth is to travel in very civilised company indeed, but also close to the ground. He has a mind that illuminates and enlivens everything it encounters.
Nigel Barley, author of The Innocent Anthropologist 

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : This Great Stage of Fools: An anthology of ...
Éditeur : Bright Wave Media
Date d'édition : 2018
Reliure : Paperback
Etat : Brand New