Its great to be here. And its wonderful to be talking about these books. And if you pick up amy stanlys stranger in the shoguns city you can smell the lamenting you can hear the cook of the abacus in the shop. You can yoeven feel the chill of the japanese snow country. This is one of the most evocative and gorgeously written examples of the historians craft you will read. In this marvelous book amy tells the story of tsuneno, a frustrated, stubborn thrice married japanese woman in the early part of the 19th century runs off to the big city of edo, the predecessor city to todays tokyo. This is a tale ofmigration, the lures of the city, aspirations , the constraints on womens lives and the indefinable force of personality and in this year and a half of tragedy, the emergence that thisbook offers in a different world is really a tonic. Stranger in the shoguns city won the 2021 pen price for biography and the 2021 National Book 1critics circle award for biography. It is also a finalist for
Of fulfilled whatever plan i could have in journalism in the since ive been a foreign correspondent, i i did an edi, the president chairman moran of said journalism is not a fit profession. If you ever get serious call me. So i did and they found a position for me as a Senior Editor at random t house which s obviously a great place to go. So i made a lateral move out of Washington Post in giving a first book editor individually a book publisher. It was a midcareer move. I brought with me all the experience i had in journalism which turned out to be very valuable and i connections. One of i the last thing. I realize almost as soon as i gather that the difference is in the newspaper business human out and got the story, and the Publishing Business you get the story and then you have to sell the story. I kind of enjoyed that part of it as much as i enjoyed getting the story, so thats why i ended up doing a career i did. In acquw to how did that happen well, im my background in journalism