New in Finds: Meiji Japan, the vanished East End, Primo Levi’s pain, Adolf Hitler’s evil…

Here is a roll-call of the most recently reissued titles in Finds, now available to order from our site and on Amazon:
The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan 1868-1905 by Pat Barr
The pavilion in question, the Rokumeikan, became a symbol of Japan’s westernisation during the Meiji period of the late 1800s/early 1900s: designed by English architect Josiah Conder for the housing of government guests and the hosting of grand parties. The Rokumeikan made for one sort of lightning-rod amid the rush of foreigners into newly-‘enlightened’ Japan, but Pat Barr tells the tales of umpteen others in this richly fascinating study.
The Double Bond – Primo Levi: A Biography by Carole Angier
The anguished life of Primo Levi is explored with uncommon acuity in this powerful biography which was lauded on first publication in the Independent (Lesley Chamberlain) and Guardian (Blake Morrison).
Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum
The meditative work that, inter alia, inspired Norman Mailer’s final novel The Castle in the Forest – Mailer saying of Rosenbaum’s work that it “stimulated the hell out of me, absolutely knocked me out…”
“Personal without being self-indulgent, erudite without being pedantic, written with passion and a moral engagement worthy of its momentous subject, ‘Explaining Hitler’ is an exemplary work of intellectual journalism, an idiosyncratic classic.” Gary Kamiya, Salon.
Science in History: Volume 4, The Social Sciences by J. D. Bernal
The concluding volume of Bernal’s exceptional survey.
The East End: Four Centuries of London Life by Alan Palmer
Palmer’s homage to a vanished quarter of the capital.
Erskine Childers by Jim Ring
Authoritative study of the prominent Irish nationalist and author of Riddle of the Sands.
Queen Victoria by Giles St Aubyn
Masterly biography of the great British monarch.
Essays on Russian and East European Music by Gerald Abraham
A set of essays including the first publication of “The Opera of Stanislaw Moniuszko”.
Follow My Black Plume by Geoffrey Trease
Rip-roaring fiction for young readers, about an English lad getting caught up in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s fight for Italian independence.
The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson
Volume 9 of A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight
The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams
Another of Williams’ unsettling supernatural fictions, this one deriving its threat from the Tarot.
The Killing of Sally Keemer by Christopher Lee
The second of Lee’s ‘Bath Detective’ series
Da Silva Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns by Wilson Harris
A fictional diptych from the great Guyanan novelist

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Our January 2011 offerings

The young Elizabeth David, whose last work is reissued in Finds this month (see left)

Precisely what, you may ask, is Finds making available to readers this month? Answer, as ever: a grand assortment of outstanding fiction and non-fiction titles that deserve renewed attention, and these are they:
FICTION
Margaret Kennedy, The Midas Touch
Siegfried Lenz, The Heritage
T.F. Powys, God’s Eyes A-Twinkle
William Sansom, Bed of Roses
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winter in the Air and Other Stories
Henry Williamson, Love and the Loveless
NON-FICTION
J.D. Bernal, Science in History vol.3: The Natural Sciences in Our Time
Elizabeth David, Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices
F.W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler, and the Fall of Italian Fascism
Amos Elon, Jerusalem: City of Mirrors
John Grigg, Lloyd George: The People’s Champion, 1902-1911
Timothy Mowl, Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman Versus Pevsner
John Cowper Powys, In Defence of Sensuality
Notes and perspectives on a few of these will follow.

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