In a November 11 article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Professor Paul Kreitman lauds two recent books, Timon Screech’s Tokyo Before Tokyo and Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City, for their ability to transport readers to the vanished city of Edo (since renamed Tokyo).
"Possibly no other country in the world possesses as rich an archive of early modern sources as Japan, nor as rich a tradition of writing fine-grained urban history. The vast bulk of this is published in Japanese, and most English-language writing is aimed at professional historians. But two recent works, Timon Screech’s Tokyo Before Tokyo and Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City, do a fine job of introducing this wealth of historical material to the general reader, serving as guidebooks orientating even the first-time traveler to one of the great cities of the early modern world," Kreitman wrote.
Click here to read the full review.
