Reviewed Elsewhere

Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan. Giles Milton. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. 352 pp. $24.00. "Adams's story is a grand one, fit to takes its place beside any of the engrossing tales of travel, displacement, and personal discovery that pepper the years of Europe's apparently unending search for trade, religious converts, and empire. In Samurai William Giles Milton presents it with undisguised gusto. His notes and bibliography make it clear that he has absorbed much of the voluminous secondary literature on this period and on Adams himself, and doubtless he also knows of the half-dozen or so historical novels written about Adams's adventures in Japan over the last century, most famously James Clavell's Shogun of 1975. But unfazed by these various precursors, Milton sensibly roots his vigorous narrative firmly in the two key sources that contain the most surviving materials on Adams and the Japanese branch of the English East India Company."

Jonathan Spence. NYRB, Apr. 10, 2003: 68-69.

Adenauer, Konrad "Frei's study, published in Germany in 1996 (this overly literal translation unfortunately fails to do justice to the original), draws upon an impressive array of archives and personal papers to document the political steps by [End Page 510] which postwar West Germany 'pardoned . . . itself' at the cost of 'living memory.'"

Belinda Cooper. NYTBR, Feb. 9, 2003: 29.

Amis, Martin "At bottom, I wanted to leave something of me and their grandfather to my children." Indeed, Kingsley Amis is the true hero of this personal, achronological narrative, in which are linked together the figure of the father, the children, a girl cousin assassinated by a serial killer, the writer Saul Bellow, and the frank evocation of the author at 17, "a snobbish idiot, at once arrogant and doleful."

Josyane Savigneau. Le Monde des Livres, June 13, 2003: 1.

Amrouche, Jean El-Moulhoub Amrouche had acquired an exceptional French culture while keeping alive his Berber sources. His own published works are scanty (Cendres, Etoiles Secrètes, Chants Berbères de Kabylie), but his critical papers (in La Tunisie française, l'Arche) brought him great fame, and his interviews of Claudel, Gide, Ungaretti, Mauriac, and Pierre-Emmanuel were epoch-making. His personal agony came precisely from his double culture. During the Algerian war, he, who defended French culture so ardently, came to write: "Men of my kind are monsters, errors of History. One day, there will be an Algerian people speaking Arabic, feeding its thoughts and dreams in the source of Islam, or there will be nothing." But he never disowned France. An irony of history: he was taken to hospital, where he was to die of cancer on the very day Arabs were massacred at the metro Charonne.

René de Cecatty. Le Monde des Livres, Mar. 28, 2003: 4.

Anderson, Marian "'When Marian Sang,' written by Pam Muñoz Ryan and illustrated by Brian Selznick, the team responsible for the stylish, award-winning 'Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride,' is designed, as the title page credits show ('Libretto by Pam Muñoz Ryan, staging by Brian Selznick'), as a performance as well asa biography. The heart of the story is the historic 1939 drama that began with the refusal of the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow the internationally acclaimed singer Marian Anderson to perform in their Constitution [End Page 511] Hall in Washington because of a 'white performers only' policy. Music lovers and anti-segregationists were outraged. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R., and Anderson gave a triumphant concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 75,000 fans."

Ellen Feldman. NYTBR, Feb. 9, 2003: 20.

Anne of Denmark "Barroll argues against the traditional view of Anna as a superficial lover of pleasure and spectacle. Instead, he situates her within a 'polymorphic body politic' that allowed a willful, intelligent royal woman chances at political intrigue, patronage, and alliance-building. . . . Future scholarship will surely rely on this study of Anna and her circle, perhaps in the context of other European courts or as background for new Jacobean...