John H. Martin (1)

I almost gave 5 stars to a walking tour book, but then I remembered I didn't exactly love the directions sometimes. But it was so close otherwise, and that's remarkable for what's essentially a useful manual. It's just that I've read so many perfunctory walking guides before (especially on e-readers, where it's harder to tell that the document is really just someone cribbing, badly, off Wikipedia to make a buck).

This wonderful book is (a) jam-packed with tours, and (b) chock-full of information about the places you visit. It's a history lesson, really, delivered via various stops on a walk, rather than in simple chronological order. Here's a snippet at random:

... a memorial marker on the left in a flower bed. It commemorates the Reverend James Curtis Hepburn, the man who created a Japanese-English dictionary in 1867 and whose Romanization of Japanese characters and the pronunciation system for Japanese bears his name.

So I've already learned something terribly interesting, and most guides would stop there (if they had even mentioned him in the first place). But Martin goes on:

Hepburn was one of many missionaries who flocked to Japan once Yokohama was opened to the West. A number of these missionaries were medical men, and Hepburn was one of the more humanitarian of these medical Protestant ministers, for he would treat Japanese and Chinese patients in his house without charge if they could not afford to pay for treatment. He and his wife began a school that eventually became Meiji Gakuin University ...

I'll be in Tokyo next year, and he's made me even more excited about attending. It's one thing to see something in person--it can seem beautiful, or unusual, or nondescript--but with Martin in hand, everything I see will be interesting and rich with history. Thank you, Sir!

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!… (altro)