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Lädt ... Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone (2017)von Richard Lloyd Parry
  
Mitski! (15) Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch.   ) cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |  So this should be very compelling reading - and at times it was incredibly poignant. The parents are so angry and in such a state of disbelief that they sue and fight the school to uncover a conspiracy that never was. I was troubled by this as well as the many sections about possession and ghosts. Umm... I should have expected it based on the title -- but the author doesn't just mean it figuratively but literally. And while I sense he is a pretty down to earth guy who doesn't buy it -- he had to be respectful of the families who confided in him and allowed him their stories to write the book. So communing with the dead and ghosts and exorcisms it is then. It just didn't do it for me. He tried to connect it to the fervent belief in religion. In Japan, the closest thing to religious fervor is worship of ancestors, so in a way it makes sense. But it just didn't resonate for me and disconnected me emotionally from the people he was writing about. Some parts were good, but overall too disjointed and repetitive. Too much material that did not connect with me. The horror of the day at the school and the immediate aftermath was excellent, the rest not so good - for an overall mediocre rating. (  ) jhowell | Aug 17, 2023 | ) KallieGrace | Jul 23, 2023 | Like mass shootings in the US, tsunamis are just a way of life in Japan, especially with the regular earthquakes they have and the geographic location of their country. It's terrifying. It was also a fantastic book. I feel like I learned a lot about Japan and, to some degree, the world. It was truly a great book. I'm thrilled to own it. Adrianne (  ) Adrianne_p | Aug 31, 2022 | ) brenzi | Nov 17, 2021 |
Lloyd Parry has opened out his celebrated essay to offer an eerie, brushstroked evocation of a whole realm of remote villages struggling to find order in a world of absences. Fittingly, his book is less a continuous narrative than a collection of shards. Torn pictures from a family photo album, as they seem, his individual stories form a fractured portrait of a country we’re more accustomed to seeing as a polished whole. In particular, he homes in on the tragedy at the Okawa Elementary School, located in a tiny coastal village “in a forgotten fold of Japan,” where 74 of the 75 children who died in Japan in 2011 while in the care of teachers perished under the wave. The village’s surviving teachers, parents and children seem, not surprisingly, barely more settled than the loved ones who were lost.... The ghosts that hover just above his charged and elemental pages are a reminder of how much this land of order remains ruled by things that can’t be seen. Japan, he reminds us, is an often-22nd-century society largely governed by the past. Parry writes about the survivors with sensitivity and a rare kind of empathy; he resists the urge to distance himself from the pain in an attempt at emotional self-preservation. The result is a book that's brutally honest, and at times difficult to read. "A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes," he writes. "And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy and fell out of love."... The stories Parry tells are wrenching, and he refuses to mitigate the enormity of the tsunami with false optimism or saccharine feel-good anecdotes. Above all, it's a beautiful meditation on grief.... In a gripping fashion, Parry builds his account around solving the excruciating mystery that haunts the parents of those who were killed: “the earthquake had struck at 2:46 p.m. The hands of the school clock were frozen at 3:37 p.m., when the building’s electricity was quenched by the rising water. This was the central question of the Okawa tragedy: What exactly happened between the first event and the second? What was going on … for the last fifty-one minutes of its existence?”.... Parry homes in on the Okawa Primary School, which — despite its frequent disaster preparedness drills and a 700-foot-tall hill behind the building — lost 74 of its 108 students and 10 of its 13 teachers and staff. By refusing to accept their evasions, and by laying out in panoramic detail what happened after the tsunami, Mr Lloyd Parry offers a voice to the grieving who, too often, found it hard to be heard. It is a thoughtful lesson to all societies whose first reaction in the face of adversity is to shut down inquiry and cover up the facts. You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year. The author’s narrative is appropriately haunted and haunting. One memorable moment comes when he describes someone brought back from the brink of madness by a perhaps unlikely method: namely, being sprinkled with holy water and thus freed from the hold of “the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead.” Parry’s set pieces come to have a certain predictability: expert–victim–expert–survivor. Yet they retain their urgency, for, as he writes, it won’t be long before another earthquake of similar or even greater intensity strikes Tokyo proper, with its millions of inhabitants; in that event, “the Nankai earthquake, which might strike at any time, could kill more people than four atomic bombs.” A sobering and compelling narrative of calamity. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
History.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML: Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit Hub Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)952.05History and Geography Asia JapanKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (4.2)
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