Italian pleasures

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Guido Gozzano

Guido Gozzano (1883-1916), a distinguished Italian poet of the early twentieth century, embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat the tuberculosis he would die from a few years later. His trip lasted three months; all told he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. Before leaving home he had engaged to send back dispatches to La Stampa; after appearing there, his "letters from India" were collected and issued posthumously as Verso la cuna del mondo (1917), now published in English for the first time. The extent of Gozzano's travels - to Ceylon, Goa, Agra, Jaipur - makes one wonder how the writer was able to visit all or even most of the places he so vividly describes. For factual details Gozzano relied on half a dozen sources, notably Pierre Loti and Paolo Mentegazza. But what counts in his book is what comes to us straight from him: a tale of enchantment. Fabulous India, fabled India - "I did not honestly think I would find so much of it intact," the spellbound traveler repeats to himself before what he must shortly recognize as prodigious evidence of decay.

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W. G. Beasley

"The Japanese Experience is an authoritative, lucid, and concise history of Japan from the sixth century to the present day. It is the history of a society and a culture with a distinct sense of itself, one of the few nations never conquered by a foreign power in historic times (until the twentieth century) and the home of the longest-reigning imperial dynasty that still survives. Regarded as a minor Asian state until the late nineteenth century, Japan transformed itself into a major power in the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET. "Throughout The Japanese Experience W. G. Beasley, a leading authority on Japan and the author of a number of acclaimed works on Japanese history, examines the changing society and culture of Japan and considers what, apart from the land and the people, is specifically Japanese about the history of Japan."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jon and Rumer Godden

This book portrays the enormous diversity of life styles and the wide ranging ethnic differences among the peoples of India.

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Peter Lourie

Lourie completed his trip. It took him three weeks and marked the first time anyone has traveled from the source of the Hudson to the mouth in a single vessel. The Hudson proved to be a very changeable river. It includes seven locks and nine power dams. The northern half is a true river with strong current, but the lower half is tidal, a sunken river from the days of glaciers. In its first 165 miles, it drops more than 4,000 feet to Albany. The second half falls no more than a foot. Lourie's account of his trip is a fresh look at one of America's great and complex waterways, one of the few, in fact, that still contains its historical and biological species of fish. It is also the longest inland estuary in the world. Henry Hudson called it the "great river of the mountains." Nowadays, too often the Hudson is stereotyped as a ruined, polluted industrial river. its glorious past is compared to its present neglect. In River of Mountains, Peter Lourie combines the Hudson's rich history and descriptions of some of the region's most impressive landscape with the residents of its mill towns, the loggers, commercial fishermen, and barge pilots - all of whom are proof that the river is still a thriving, vital waterway.