Author: Noel Annan
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Keywords: geniuses, eccentrics, mentors, dons
Number of Pages: 367
Published: 2001-08-05
List price: $17.50
ISBN-10: 0226021084
ISBN-13: 9780226021089

For two hundred years Oxford and Cambridge Universities were home to some of Britain’s greatest teachers and intellects, each forming the minds of the passing generations of students and influencing the thinking and practice of university learning throughout the country and the world.In this entertaining, informative book, Noel Annan is at his incisive best. Displaying his customary mastery of his subject, he describes the great dons in all their glory and eccentricities: who they were, what they were like, why they mattered, and what their legacy is. Written with love and wisdom, the gr

Author: Christopher Benfey
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Keywords: opening, old, japan, eccentrics, japanese, gilded, misfits, wave
Number of Pages: 352
Published: 2004-08-10
List price: $16.00
ISBN-10: 0375754555
ISBN-13: 9780375754555

When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1