Book Description

After a year's sabbatical in Kyoto, a college professor presents a collection of essays on traditional Japanese culture.

As booksellers since 1986, we have been stocking the pages of our monthly catalogue, A Common Reader, with "Books for Readers with Imagination." Now as publishers, the same motto guides our work. Simply put, the title we issue as Common Reader Editions are volumes of uncommon merit which we have enjoyed, and which we think other imaginative readers will enjoy as well. While our selections are as personal as the act of reading itself, what's common to our enterprise is the sense of shared experience a good book brings to solitarity readers. We invite you to sample the wide range of Common Reader Editions, and welcome your comments.

Many of the current books written by Americans about Japan are belligerent polemics-- "They're beating us because……" or "We're better than them because……" sorts of books. Following the Bush, John Elder's elegant collection of essays describing " an American encounter with classical Japanese culture," is a distinctive exception. It centers around a "richly marginal year" ( "Japan is an adventure for me, not a profession") which Elder and his family spent in Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital. At the heart of the book are Elder's graceful meditations on several classical Japanese arts of which he is an appreciative student.

Following the Bush is thus a notable collection of "personal stories, of encounters with Japan's living traditions, by one sympathetic noneexpert."

About Author

John Elder is professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middleburry College in Vermont. His other books include Reading the Mountains of Home (1998) and Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985); with Robert Finch he edited The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), and with Hertha D. Wong he edited Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature from Around the World (1994)