Banzai Hurrah

Legacies Are Forever By: Richard Neil LaBute Jr. The conclusion to author Richard Neil LaBute Jr.’s exciting trilogy, following The Search and From Across the Waters, takes us to Japan, where young liberal heirs to centuries-old fiefdoms unite to bring about the end to the Tokugawa Shogunate. The two-hundred-fifty-year reign of Tokugawa military rule is over. The Restoration has brought the Meiji Emperor out of the secluded confines of Kyoto and back to the center of government and power in old Yedo, now Tokyo. The Sonno Joi, revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians movement has succeeded, yet failed. The Shogun is gone, but the hated bakufu, Tokugawa-era government bureaucrats, remain. Japan as a nation quickly sheds its medieval past, rapidly emulates, then seizes a place at the table of modern nations, much to the dismay and expense of its neighbors—north, south, west, and ultimately the United States and its possessions to the east. In Europe, Prussia, with the help of Bavaria, cements together a Germanic nation, as France tends to its colonies on many continents. The three-hundred-year-old Romanov Russian Empire teeters on the brink of disaster and revolution. Equally decrepit empires of the Ottoman Turks, Austro-Hungarians, and Ching Dynasty of China also near their end. The riddance of imperial overlords, national identity, and the power of the proletariat are themes du jour, of the day.

With its unparalleled coverage of English slang of all types (from 18th-century cant to contemporary gay slang), and its uncluttered editorial apparatus, Cassell's Dictionary of Slang was warmly received when its first edition appeared in 1998. 'Brilliant.' said Mark Lawson on BBC2's The Late Review; 'This is a terrific piece of work - learned, entertaining, funny, stimulating' said Jonathan Meades in The Evening Standard.But now the world's best single-volume dictionary of English slang is about to get even better. Jonathon Green has spent the last seven years on a vast project: to research in depth the English slang vocabulary and to hunt down and record written instances of the use of as many slang words as possible. This has entailed trawling through more than 4000 books - plus song lyrics, TV and movie scripts, and many newspapers and magazines - for relevant material. The research has thrown up some fascinating results

This book describes how American and Japanese management ideologies meet, collide, and contend in the process of competitive cooperation during a joint venture in Japan. In a detailed case study, Hamada describes the very real problems when Japanese and American managers run a business operation, and analyzes them from a comparative, relativistic, and historical perspective. The author presents a novel and effective way of viewing organizational dynamics, seeing the ‘unfinished’ cultural process between different sub-groups who create and recreate the symbolic meanings of corporate phenomena. Her succinct analysis of Japanese and American behavioral modes makes both practical and theoretical contributions to the field of international management. Highlighting the interdependence between corporate culture and broader societal culture, Hamada looks closely at interactions between American and Japanese businessmen, analyzes their cultural differences, and proposes that these differences can be viewed not just as a source of continuing conflict but of dynamic cooperation.

This is the gripping historical tragedy of the 220 km railroad that bored its way through the hot, humid Sumatran jungle during World War II. The railway was commissioned by Japan and built with the blood and tears of Allied prisoners of war and press-ganged Javanese romushas. Henk Hovinga interviewed nearly one hundred former railroad workers and did painstaking archival research. The result is a moving book, richly illustrated with numerous authentic drawings of life in the internment camps, charts and photographs.

The poet George Barker was convinced that his biography could never be written. 'I've stirred the facts around too much,' he told Robert Fraser. 'It simply can't be done.' Eliot wrote of his 'genius'. Yeats thought him the most interesting poet of his generation. Dylan Thomas envied his power over women. War trapped him in Japan. In America he conducted one of the most celebrated love affairs of the century. He fathered fifteen children in several countries, three during one battle-torn summer. By the 1950s he was the toast of Soho. Barker was Catholic and bohemian, frank and elusive, tender and boisterous. In Eliot's phrase, he was 'a most peculiar fellow.' Robert Fraser's biography offers both a portrait of a talented, tormented and irresistibly entertaining man, and a broad cultural landscape. Around the central figure cluster painters like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Johnny Minton and the 'Roberts' Colquhoun and MacBryde; writers such as Dylan Thomas, Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Smart, whose By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept hymns their liaison; the lugubrious humorist Jeffrey Bernard. After closing time at the Colony Room, Minton declared, they had to sweep up the jokes.

Provides an invaluable and very accessible addition to existing biographic sources and references, not least because of the supporting biographies of major writers and the historical and cultural notes provided.