Jun'ichi Watanabe. Beyond The Blossoming Fields. Translated by Deborah Iwabuchi and Anna Isozaki. London: Alma Books Ltd., 2008.
R. Stuhr
Blossoming Fields is the biography of the first female doctor trained to practice western medicine in Japan. This story, a bestseller in Japan and translated into English by my favorite translator, Deborah Iwabuchi and her colleague Anna Isozaki, presents Ginko in all of her bravery, hard as nails determination, and ego. Born into an important landed family, Ginko was married in the traditional manner of the time, but was unlucky enough to contract gonorrhea from her husband. She left her husband's household to return home to be cared for by her own family. Her illness served to magnify her unhappiness with her status as wife and even after she recovered she refused to go back to her husband--subjecting her family to the ignominy of a divorce. Her illness and recovery were the motivation for her medical pursuits. Seeking a cure, she and her mother went to Tokyo to visit a doctor trained in western style medicine. Ginko is mortified by the internal exam and this leads to her desire to become a doctor so that women have the option of being examined by a female rather than a male doctor.
The path is anything but smooth. Ginko is disinherited by her family, lives on almost nothing and studies at all hours so that she will be the top student in all of her classes. Watanabe leaves no doubt about the nearly insurmountable obstacles she had to overcome. It was not illegal for women to attend medical school or to practice medicine, but it was not done nor acceptable in the society. It took years for Ginko to get into medical school and then she experienced both verbal and physical abuse. Somehow, despite poverty, starvation, threats, and isolation, Ginko achieved her dream and opened a clinic in Tokyo where she treated both men and women. Ginko attended to her patients and her staff with fiery moral zeal. She was loved and hated. No one seemed to get past her very private personality until, following her conversion to Christianity, she meets a young man who has aspirations to set up a Christian utopia in the far north of Japan. She finds her self in the midst of another controversy when she decides to marry the younger man and eventually leave her practice to join him in Hokkaido.
Ginko’s life is never easy and in the end, her greatness was in what she achieved to become a doctor and in the door she opened for other Japanese women to do the same.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Ralph Nader's "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us."
Ralph Nader, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009.
Reviewed by T. Hatch
One might wonder how can the super-rich do anything but enslave us? Ralph Nader in the Author's Note implores us, in a corollary on Coleridge's willful suspension of disbelief, to utilize our sense of “imaginative engagement.” While Nader describes the genre of this work as a “practical utopia” (a charming and provocative oxymoron in its own right) I came to think of this process as more of a consciously informed credulity.
Seventeen aging billionaires at the behest of Warren Buffet take to meeting at a resort hotel in Maui and conspire to lead a series of mass movements that successfully commodifies worker justice and democracy. Naturally along the way a host of reactionaries such as the U.S. Chamber of Congress and the management of Wal Mart push back but the “Meliorists” are too well organized, too well funded, and being the old geezers that they are have nothing left to lose.
Nader clearly wants to stand Aldous Huxley on his head (insomuch as he openly says so). Several of the reviews of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” have focused on the more fanciful elements of the narrative, e.g. Wal Mart management caving into popular pressure and acquiescing to unionization of its labor force, as evidence of some form of nostalgic dementia on the part of Mr. Nader. Anyone who confuses this book for a blueprint or a guide to action misses the point. The imagination that Nader appeals to reminds me of the Annalist historian Marc Bloch's use of the term. For Bloch, a member of the French resistance tortured and killed by the Nazis at Lyon, that imagintion was a means to an empathetic historical understanding. It does not mean creating a narrative cut from whole cloth, rather it is an injunction to creatively imagine the solving of problems. Nader is clearly not using imagination then in the same way that the utopian socialist Charles Fourier was.
I spoke with the author albeit briefly on a radio call in show today (October 7th) shortly before writing this critique. Unfortunately Mr. Nader did not answer my first question which wasL: is corporate capitalism worth saving through reform. He instead concentrated on my comment that he mentions what was being served for lunch and food in general dozens of times throughout the book. There is much I wish I had said but didn't. For instance, by last March I was sorry that I hadn't voted for you for a fourth time.
On order for Burling Library
Reviewed by T. Hatch
One might wonder how can the super-rich do anything but enslave us? Ralph Nader in the Author's Note implores us, in a corollary on Coleridge's willful suspension of disbelief, to utilize our sense of “imaginative engagement.” While Nader describes the genre of this work as a “practical utopia” (a charming and provocative oxymoron in its own right) I came to think of this process as more of a consciously informed credulity.
Seventeen aging billionaires at the behest of Warren Buffet take to meeting at a resort hotel in Maui and conspire to lead a series of mass movements that successfully commodifies worker justice and democracy. Naturally along the way a host of reactionaries such as the U.S. Chamber of Congress and the management of Wal Mart push back but the “Meliorists” are too well organized, too well funded, and being the old geezers that they are have nothing left to lose.
Nader clearly wants to stand Aldous Huxley on his head (insomuch as he openly says so). Several of the reviews of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” have focused on the more fanciful elements of the narrative, e.g. Wal Mart management caving into popular pressure and acquiescing to unionization of its labor force, as evidence of some form of nostalgic dementia on the part of Mr. Nader. Anyone who confuses this book for a blueprint or a guide to action misses the point. The imagination that Nader appeals to reminds me of the Annalist historian Marc Bloch's use of the term. For Bloch, a member of the French resistance tortured and killed by the Nazis at Lyon, that imagintion was a means to an empathetic historical understanding. It does not mean creating a narrative cut from whole cloth, rather it is an injunction to creatively imagine the solving of problems. Nader is clearly not using imagination then in the same way that the utopian socialist Charles Fourier was.
I spoke with the author albeit briefly on a radio call in show today (October 7th) shortly before writing this critique. Unfortunately Mr. Nader did not answer my first question which wasL: is corporate capitalism worth saving through reform. He instead concentrated on my comment that he mentions what was being served for lunch and food in general dozens of times throughout the book. There is much I wish I had said but didn't. For instance, by last March I was sorry that I hadn't voted for you for a fourth time.
On order for Burling Library
Friday, October 16, 2009
It Takes a Pillage
Nomi Prins. It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. Hoboken New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2009.
Reviewed by T. Hatch
A trillion here, a trillion there, the next thing you know.... $19.3 trillion dollars is the current price tag for the bailout of the nation's banking system according to author, and former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins. That robust total includes everything chipped in from the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, The FDIC, and from Congress, to save capitalism as we know it. Prins has labeled this event as “the Second Great Bank Depression.” It is the single largest transfer of wealth in human history; we watched while it happened.
The magnitude of this brazenness is difficult to get one's mind around. Quantified a little differently, one million dollars in cash (i.e. 10,000 one hundred dollar bills) weighs about 144 lbs. Therefore $19.3 trillion weighs 2,779,200 pounds. A fifty-three foot semi trailer holds approximately 46,500 pounds of load; this is enough currency to fill sixty of these trucks. How far this cash would stretch into outer space if placed end-to-end is an open question.
Prins is clearly angry and it shows in her writing. While this contempt is understandable, and shared by almost everyone who is not a CEO with a Wall Street Bank, it does become somewhat tiresome. If the subject were the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade no rational or moral person would defend either practice. But to condemn the evil on every page wears the reader out and detracts from the larger argument.
This is a solid book because it is thoroughly researched and Prins has the technical expertise to make sense of the subject matter. Several themes are developed in some depth in this work. Bipartisanship may seem like it has disappeared from Washington but it remains alive and well when it comes to providing the banking industry with all of the taxpayer funds they need to sustain the current casino environment on Wall Street. The Fed is a highly secretive organization that operates with impunity in providing liquidity to the members of the financial elect. The removal of critical and effective regulation (especially the Glass-Steagall Act) was a disaster. And, allowing banks that were too big in the first instance to further consolidate through merger and acquistion is pouring gasoline on the fire. Finally, since almost nothing has changed structurally in our financial system there is bound to be another melt-down even worse than the current crisis, sometime in the not to distant future.
Prins also provides updated information on her website showing where, and how much, money is going to various financial institutions. It is clear from the information on the website and reading It Takes a Pillage that free markets are anything but free.
On order for Burling Library
Reviewed by T. Hatch
A trillion here, a trillion there, the next thing you know.... $19.3 trillion dollars is the current price tag for the bailout of the nation's banking system according to author, and former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Nomi Prins. That robust total includes everything chipped in from the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, The FDIC, and from Congress, to save capitalism as we know it. Prins has labeled this event as “the Second Great Bank Depression.” It is the single largest transfer of wealth in human history; we watched while it happened.
The magnitude of this brazenness is difficult to get one's mind around. Quantified a little differently, one million dollars in cash (i.e. 10,000 one hundred dollar bills) weighs about 144 lbs. Therefore $19.3 trillion weighs 2,779,200 pounds. A fifty-three foot semi trailer holds approximately 46,500 pounds of load; this is enough currency to fill sixty of these trucks. How far this cash would stretch into outer space if placed end-to-end is an open question.
Prins is clearly angry and it shows in her writing. While this contempt is understandable, and shared by almost everyone who is not a CEO with a Wall Street Bank, it does become somewhat tiresome. If the subject were the Holocaust or the Atlantic slave trade no rational or moral person would defend either practice. But to condemn the evil on every page wears the reader out and detracts from the larger argument.
This is a solid book because it is thoroughly researched and Prins has the technical expertise to make sense of the subject matter. Several themes are developed in some depth in this work. Bipartisanship may seem like it has disappeared from Washington but it remains alive and well when it comes to providing the banking industry with all of the taxpayer funds they need to sustain the current casino environment on Wall Street. The Fed is a highly secretive organization that operates with impunity in providing liquidity to the members of the financial elect. The removal of critical and effective regulation (especially the Glass-Steagall Act) was a disaster. And, allowing banks that were too big in the first instance to further consolidate through merger and acquistion is pouring gasoline on the fire. Finally, since almost nothing has changed structurally in our financial system there is bound to be another melt-down even worse than the current crisis, sometime in the not to distant future.
Prins also provides updated information on her website showing where, and how much, money is going to various financial institutions. It is clear from the information on the website and reading It Takes a Pillage that free markets are anything but free.
On order for Burling Library
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Knopf, 2008.
Submitted by Catherine Rod
Swedish author Larsson was a journalist who died at the age of 50 and before his three novels were published. The others in the series of three are The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf 2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf 2010). Dragon Tattoo is about corporate and family corruption, tragedy and human vulnerability. Catherine Rod, an avid reader of mysteries, notes that this is the first of Larsson's three posthumously published novels. "It is absolutely riveting and has an interesting main character. If you like mysteries, try this one!"
All three novels are on order for Burling Library.
Submitted by Catherine Rod
Swedish author Larsson was a journalist who died at the age of 50 and before his three novels were published. The others in the series of three are The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf 2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Knopf 2010). Dragon Tattoo is about corporate and family corruption, tragedy and human vulnerability. Catherine Rod, an avid reader of mysteries, notes that this is the first of Larsson's three posthumously published novels. "It is absolutely riveting and has an interesting main character. If you like mysteries, try this one!"
All three novels are on order for Burling Library.
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