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A New Yorker Best Book of the Year The remarkable life of violinist
and teacher Shinichi Suzuki, who pioneered an innovative but
often-misunderstood philosophy of early childhood education-now
known the world over as the Suzuki Method. The name Shinichi Suzuki
is synonymous with early childhood musical education. By the time
of his death in 1998, countless children around the world had been
taught using his methods, with many more to follow. Yet Suzuki's
life and the evolution of his educational vision remain largely
unexplored. A committed humanist, he was less interested in musical
genius than in imparting to young people the skills and confidence
to learn. Eri Hotta details Suzuki's unconventional musical
development and the emergence of his philosophy. She follows Suzuki
from his youth working in his father's Nagoya violin factory to his
studies in interwar Berlin, the beginnings of his teaching career
in 1930s Tokyo, and the steady flourishing of his practice at home
and abroad after the Second World War. As Hotta shows, Suzuki's aim
was never to turn out disciplined prodigies but rather to create a
world where all children have the chance to develop, musically and
otherwise. Undergirding his pedagogy was an unflagging belief that
talent, far from being an inborn quality, is cultivated through
education. Moreover, Suzuki's approach debunked myths of musical
nationalism in the West, where many doubted that Asian performers
could communicate the spirit of classical music rooted in Europe.
Suzuki touched the world through a pedagogy founded on the
conviction that all children possess tremendous capacity to learn.
His story offers not only a fresh perspective on early childhood
education but also a gateway to the fraught history of musical
border-drawing and to the makings of a globally influential life in
Japan's tumultuous twentieth century.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor
from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how
we think of the war in the Pacific.
When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941,
argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were
entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on
material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in
depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did
these men--military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the
emperor--put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in
harm's way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be
patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta
brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed--eager to avoid war
but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless
militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor,
tempted by the gambler's dream of scoring the biggest win against
impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally
proved inevitable.
In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and
doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals
just how divided Japan's leaders were, right up to (and, in fact,
beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling
cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same
leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to
adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at
least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable
to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge
Washington's hardening disapproval of their continental incursions.
Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the
Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign
minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and
his facile supporters cemented Japan's place in the fascist
alliance with Germany and Italy--unaware (or unconcerned) that in
so doing they destroyed the nation's bona fides with the West.
We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders
reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating
a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic
rivalry between Japan's army and navy. Roles are recast and blame
reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the
hawks and skeptics among Japan's elite. Emperor Hirohito and
General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two
men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it.
Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing--both
Japanese and Western--to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn
by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with
saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by
incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An
essential book for any student of the Second World War, this
compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember
those days of infamy.
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