Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize

Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.

Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the

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"A book about the samurai from their origins in the eighth and ninth centuries until their demise in the mid-nineteenth century. It dispels a lot of myths about the samurai one might encounter in popular culture. It describes samurai life, work, philosophy, and warfare as it changed over time. It covers what samurai were doing when they weren't fighting. For example, samurai who engaged in commerce, formed gangs, begged, and even taught samurai etiquette...

This modern classic of military history has been called "one of the most important personal accounts of war that I have ever read" by distinguished historian John Keegan. Author E.B. Sledge served with the First Marine Division during WWII, and his first-hand narrative is unsurpassed in its sincerity. Sledge's experience shows in this fascinating account of two of the most harrowing and pivotal island battles of the Pacific theater. On Peleliu and...

The story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. The author follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker Magazine of August 31, 1946 devoted all its space to this story and the immediate repercussions were vast. Almost four decades after the original publication of this book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told and records...

"After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen--Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures...

Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate...

Published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, a riveting narrative of human resilience, told through first-hand experiences of five survivors, reveals the physical, emotional and social challenges of post-atomic life.

When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child, he had ended up a servant and bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, with whom he traversed India and China learning multiple languages as he went. His arrival in Kyoto, however, literally caused a riot. Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before, and many of them saw him as the embodiment of the black-skinned...

While visiting his dad's hometown in Japan four months after his father's death, Ben and his family are swept away-and pulled apart-by a terrible tsunami. Eleven-year-old Japanese-American Owen has been in Japan for his sixth-grade year. By March, he finally feels like he's getting the hang of the new culture. But early one morning, everything changes and Owen suddenly finds himself just trying to survive one of history's most devastating disasters....