S. Park

Humane justice, April 22 2004

Smith creates a charming, considerate, overweight, wise, and, most of all an utterly convincing character lady detective Precious Ramotswe. Unlike usual detectives, Mma Ramotswe makes mistakes in life, and she does not hesitate to acknowledge them. She is proud of her homeland, Botswana, her heritage, her father, and even of her chubbiness, as being fat is the how good Botswanian women should be. She is undeterred by westernization -- she seeks to live her life by the traditional African way. Events take place in the vicinity of her city, and across the Kalahari Desert. The volume as a whole is of parallel structure, Mma Ramotswe solving one case after another. The cases she gets appointed… Read more

Trading practices of the Jewish community, 17C Amsterdam, Mar 23 2004

During the production of the film "The Hidden Fortress," the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa had been quoted to have gone through the following iteration: a seemingly insoluble situation would be crafted, and only after a concerted deliberation by the production team would the protagonist be given a way out, and the film proceed to the next scene. The reader need only be reminded of this anecdote to grasp the nature of this novel. Where no friends remain friends or enemies remain enemies, the protagonist Miguel Lienzo, a Jew migrated from Portugal to Amsterdam, hurdles through the ever-changing vistas of deception and schemes to obtain a monopoly on coffee, then (17C) an… Read more

Vivid account of the early Japanese-European encounter, Jan 19 2004

The book spans the time between the Portuguese navigator Fernão Mendes Pinto first arrived in Kyushu, Japan in 1542 (Pinto was the first European to set foot on Japan) till the time of the English pilot William Adams' death in 1690 at Adams' age of 55. Pinto's own records as well as Francis Xavier's (Spanish Jesuit missionary) are used to describe Japan during the time of Pinto. William Adams' ship log was used to reconstruct his voyage to Japan. Adams' ascension in the shogun's (Tokugawa Ieyasu) court is treated rather lightly through his own, scant records. The remaining half of the book roughly follows Richard Cocks' (an English Merchant who arrived in Japan later than Adams) account of… Read more