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Stranger in the Shogun's City
- A Japanese Woman and Her World
- Narrated by: Joy Osmanski
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography
Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
A “captivating” (The Washington Post) work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo - the city that would become Tokyo - and a portrait of a great city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West.
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces - and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval - she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak.
With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture - and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions.
“A compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy” (The Wall Street Journal), Stranger in the Shogun’s City is “a vivid, polyphonic portrait of life in 19th-century Japan [that] evokes the Shogun era with panache and insight” (National Review of Books).
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In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.
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Great story with an added benefit
- By Scottsville Stu on 12-30-21
By: Rebecca Frankel
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The Grandees
- America's Sephardic Elite
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1654, 23 Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution.
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Amazing American History - Jews Made a Profound Impact
- By Jimmy Rosen on 12-27-21
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The Five
- The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
- By: Hallie Rubenhold
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told.
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Everyone needs to read/listen to this book
- By AAHickman on 12-05-19
By: Hallie Rubenhold
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Jamestown Brides
- By: Jennifer Potter
- Narrated by: Charlotte Strevens
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamestown, England's first real foothold in the New World, was fraught with danger - from starvation and disease to violent skirmishes between colonists and the native populations. Mortality rates were impossibly high: six out of seven settlers died within the first few years. How clear these and other perils were made to the 56 young women who left their homes and boarded ships in England in 1621, nearly 15 years after Jamestown's founding, is not known. But we do know who they were. Their ages ranged from 16 to 28, and they were deemed "young and uncorrupt".
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WOMEN IN HISTORY
- By Grams on 06-29-19
By: Jennifer Potter
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House of Glass
- The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family
- By: Hadley Freeman
- Narrated by: Hadley Freeman
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Hadley Freeman knew her grandmother, Sara, lived in France just as Hitler started to gain power, but rarely did anyone in her family talk about it. Long after her grandmother’s death, she found a shoebox tucked in the closet containing photographs of her grandmother with a mysterious stranger, a cryptic telegram from the Red Cross, and a drawing signed by Picasso. This discovery sent Freeman on a decade-long quest to uncover the significance of these keepsakes, taking her from Picasso’s archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island to Auschwitz.
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Performance
- By Derek on 08-30-22
By: Hadley Freeman
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The White Devil's Daughters
- The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown
- By: Julia Flynn Siler
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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During the first hundred years of Chinese immigration - from 1848 to 1943 - San Francisco was home to a shockingly extensive underground slave trade in Asian women, who were exploited as prostitutes and indentured servants. In this gripping, necessary book, best-selling author Julia Flynn Siler shines a light on this little-known chapter in our history - and gives us a vivid portrait of the safe house to which enslaved women escaped.
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Well researched
- By Qats reads on 08-05-19
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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister
- Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China
- By: Jung Chang
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through 100 years of wars, revolutions, and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. All three sisters enjoyed tremendous privilege and glory, but also endured constant mortal danger. They showed great courage and experienced passionate love, as well as despair and heartbreak.
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Fascinating reading
- By David L. Jones on 03-26-20
By: Jung Chang
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The Cubans
- Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times
- By: Anthony DePalma
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Anthony DePalma
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.
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The real Cuba
- By Tinkerbell on 10-11-20
By: Anthony DePalma
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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
- My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
- By: Lucette Lagnado
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.
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A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
- By Brustar on 06-10-20
By: Lucette Lagnado
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American Ghost
- A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest
- By: Hannah Nordhaus
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.
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A true American tale
- By Cleo Colorado on 05-29-15
By: Hannah Nordhaus
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Vanderbilt
- The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
- By: Anderson Cooper, Katherine Howe
- Narrated by: Anderson Cooper
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times best-selling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty - his mother’s family, the Vanderbilts.
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Interesting Approach to a Well Known History
- By HistoryNerd on 09-24-21
By: Anderson Cooper, and others
What listeners say about Stranger in the Shogun's City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mimsy
- 09-01-22
An Empathetic Glimpse Into The Past
So I have been planning a trip to Japan for a little while now. As a result, I like to dive headfirst into understanding the culture and its history as best I can. This was an excellent story to help me get some understanding of Japanese culture at a very tumultuous time in the 1800s. I thought the narrator was fantastic. Enjoy.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-04-20
Learn about the Japan you never knew existed.
Wonderfully evocative of the Edo period and beyond in Japan. using archived documents, the author reveals the world of a woman who broke rules in order to live her own life.
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3 people found this helpful
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- PW
- 03-05-22
Not Clavell’s Shogun
The author’s passion for the history of this lost city and the women who contributed and suffered , as did so many of the population , is clear. She is meticulous in sharing the detail she gathered in 10 years of research including the Shogunate, life in the provinces, global politics and more. I found the narrator excellent in her storytelling.
Sadly, there was not enough in the way of documented interactions with people who actually knew the main character to leave her as other than the ‘stranger’ in the title. I was left feeling the author’s sentiments of regret , and wanting more.
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- Beth Richardson
- 01-08-22
Evocative Story of 19th century Japan
I very much enjoyed this book. The reader is terrific. I learned a lot, too. I felt like I was with our heroine as she navigated life in Edo.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Sarah C.
- 12-30-21
The Japan Before 1853
Japanese history and culture interest me greatly, so I chose this book out of a curiosity to know more. Japanese women of this period are not well-known, so Stanley's research about one ordinary woman's story is also intriguing.
Sunano was not a city girl, but the daughter of a country priest expected to marry and raise a family near her community. Instead, she chose to not marry (after several failed arranged marriages) and go live independently in a city she had never been to: Edo. Even though she had no support from her family and no one to trust, she persisted in trying to live a life that she could choose for herself. The bravery of doing so in this period is remarkable and that Sunano eventually succeeded in her wish even more so.
This period is also before the arrival of the West in 1853, so Japan's closed nature allowed it to focus internally on culture and social norms. Stanley demonstrated well how tightly the shogunate controlled everyday life, from moving between cities to what plays could be performed. She also shows how life in the provinces was very different from the city, which tended toward tradition and being stationary. And of course, the opportunities for a single woman without family or connection in a new city were also limited.
I enjoyed this book and the glimpse it gave of Japan during the Tokugawa era. And Sunano's story was compelling and inspiring, showing how even a country girl could chart her own course in a new place. I definitely recommend it if you're interested in Japanese or women's history.
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- RG
- 09-24-21
10% plot 90% research
If one was looking for a history of life during the shogun era, this is your book. The research is outstanding. But if you’re looking die a novel, this probably isn’t your book. The plot was very thin and not that interesting
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1 person found this helpful
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- Bryan MacKinnon
- 01-07-23
Recommended for anyone with an interest in Japan
I very much enjoyed this audiobook. I recommend it for anyone who has an interest in Japan, its history, especially the late Feudal period.
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- JS
- 07-26-21
Lovely microhistory
In the dusty letters of a servant woman which she discovered in an archive, Stanley uncovers a gripping, emotional microhistory. She reads aggressively and convincingly against the ideological grain of the letters she uncovered, showing that Tsuneno was not a disobedient and problematic daughter as her relatives saw her, but a strong-willed woman willing to work as hard as she could to lighten the burden on her family and make a life that she could call her own in Edo. If you already know early modern Japan you will find that the text is a bit padded with generic information, but some of the context is eye-opening and the underlying microhistory packs an emotional punch.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Kit loose
- 02-13-21
Makes the past come alive!
As a professional tour guide specializing in Japan, I so appreciate the vivid details of everday 19th century Japanese life rendered thoughtfully and relatable. Bravo!
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5 people found this helpful
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- M. A. Sanchez
- 07-08-22
Too much filler
It seems like there wasn't a lot of source material for the author to use in writing this book. In order to make up for that she spends a lot of time filling in the world around the main character. Listen to this book if you want an idea of what life in Japan was like during the protagonist's era -- not for a gripping narrative.
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1 person found this helpful