This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis in the early postwar years probes the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of this book, often considered Dazai's masterpiece, made the term 'people of the setting sun' -- the declining aristocracy -- a permanent part of the Japanese language. Dazai's heroine, Kazuko, the strong-willed young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, stands as a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world. The distinguished translator Donald Keene has said of the author's work: 'His world...suggest Chekhov or possibly postwar France...but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book.'
The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings. A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.
Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. It is a book filled with chilling tales of looted palaces, burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding bands of thugs and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is the story of how a centuries’-old elite famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the empire, its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Drawing on the private archives of two great families – the Sheremetovs and the Golitsyns – it is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class, so-called 'former people', managed to find a place for themselves and their families in the hostile world of the Soviet Union. It reveals, too, how even at the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on - men and women fell in love, children were born, friends gathered. Ultimately, Former People is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Moving and provocative short stories that explore the strained relations between parent and child, husband an wife, brothers, and friends, as traditional values of rural Africa clash with ambitions of urban life.
Padrón reveals the evolution of Spain’s imagining of the New World as a space in continuity with Asia. Narratives of Europe’s westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct landmass, separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun. The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost a hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.
At age 60 Dr. Richard Morgan wrote No Wrinkles on the Soul as he faced the unknowns of aging and felt the need for a book to help himself and others navigate its challenges, especially the spiritual ones. Now 91, Morgan still faces many unknowns, and once again has written a book that describes how it feels to be old and encourages others in the same stage of life. "The years have taken a toll on my body," he writes, "but my mind and spirit are still young!" Light of Setting Suns contains stories of people age 90 and beyond who have remained vital and spiritually alive, including the author's own experiences. Morgan shows how to discover wellness, even in years of decline, and how these years may be unexpectedly rich and meaningful. This book shows readers that, even at an advanced age, they still have the opportunity to shine with the Spirit.
When a letter from an Indian historian arrives out of the blue and informs leading academic Bart Moore-Gilbert that his beloved deceased father, a member of the Indian Police before Independence, took part in the abuse of civilians, his world is shaken as cherished childhood memories are challenged. He sets out in search of the truth-discovering much about the end of empire, the state of India today, and whether his father, as one of the many characters on his quest claims, really was a terrorist. Crisscrossing western India, and following leads from bustling Mumbai to remote rural locations, Moore-Gilbert pieces together the truth, discovering that the story of his father's life links today's politics with the past's, colonial India with its modern incarnation, terrorism across the ages, and father with son. The Setting Sun is at once an extraordinary meditative voyage across India, a story of the dying days of an empire, and a gripping family history.
After winning the presidency by a razor-thin victory on November 8, 1960, over Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s former vice president, John F. Kennedy became the thirty-fifth president of the United States. But beneath the stately veneers of both Ike and JFK, there was a complex and consequential rivalry. In Rising Star, Setting Sun, John T. Shaw focuses on the intense ten-week transition between JFK’s electoral victory and his inauguration on January 20, 1961. In just over two months, America would transition into a new age, and nowhere was it more marked that in the generational and personal difference between these two men and their dueling visions for the country they led. The former general espoused frugality, prudence, and stewardship. The young political wu¨nderkid embodied dramatic themes and sweeping social change. Extensively researched and eloquently written, Shaw paints a vivid picture of what Time called a “turning point in the twentieth century” as Americans today find themselves poised on the cusp of another watershed moment in our nation’s history.
What do tattoos, obesity, and America's shrinking attention span have to do with our growing national debt? In Setting Sun, Brandon Adams explores how cultural shifts are merely signals of economic decline poised to create a very painful period in American history. Adams effortlessly explains the ugly and complicated truth about the U.S. economy and explores the political, social, and economic conflicts rising from the decisions lawmakers and ordinary Americans make each day. How did we go from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor nation? Why can't we answer simple questions about out money supply? How large will psychological variables loom over our new economic reality? Adams answers all the questions you aren't hearing the media ask and lawmakers won't talk about.
“Richly detailed and well-researched,” this story of one Native American chief’s resistance to American expansionism “unfolds like a political thriller” (Publishers Weekly). Toward the Setting Sun chronicles one of the most significant but least explored periods in American history—the nineteenth century forced removal of Native Americans from their lands—through the story of Chief John Ross, who came to be known as the Cherokee Moses. Son of a Scottish trader and a quarter-Cherokee woman, Ross was educated in white schools and was only one-eighth Indian by blood. But as Cherokee chief in the mid-nineteenth century, he would guide the tribe through its most turbulent period. The Cherokees’ plight lay at the epicenter of nearly all the key issues facing America at the time: western expansion, states’ rights, judicial power, and racial discrimination. Clashes between Ross and President Andrew Jackson raged from battlefields and meeting houses to the White House and Supreme Court. As whites settled illegally on the Nation’s land, the chief steadfastly refused to sign a removal treaty. But when a group of renegade Cherokees betrayed their chief and negotiated their own agreement, Ross was forced to lead his people west. In one of America’s great tragedies, thousands died during the Cherokees’ migration on the Trail of Tears. “Powerful and engaging . . . By focusing on the Ross family, Hicks brings narrative energy and original insight to a grim and important chapter of American life.” —Jon Meacham
