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The Sakura Obsession
- The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer, Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
The incredible - and improbable - story of how an English eccentric saved Japan’s beloved cherry blossoms from extinction.
Collingwood Ingram - known as “Cherry” for his defining passion - was born in 1880 and lived until he was a hundred, witnessing a fraught century of conflict and change. Visiting Japan in 1902 and again in 1907, he fell in love with the country’s distinctive cherry blossoms, or sakura, and brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England, where he created a garden of cherry varieties.
On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to find a dramatic decline in local cherry diversity. A cloned variety was taking over the landscape and becoming the symbol of Japan’s expansionist ambitions, while the rare and spectacular Taihaku, or “Great White Cherry”, had disappeared entirely.
But thousands of miles away, at Ingram’s country estate, the Taihaku still prospered. After returning to Britain, the amateur botanist buried a living cutting from his own collection into a potato and repatriated it to Japan via the Trans-Siberian Express. Over the decades that followed, Ingram became one of the world’s leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura both nationally and internationally, sending more than a hundred varieties of cherry tree to new homes around the globe, from Auckland, New Zealand to Washington, DC.
As much a history of the cherry blossom in Japan as it is the story of one remarkable man, The Sakura Obsession follows the flower from its significance as a symbol of the imperial court, through the dark days of the Second World War, and up to the present-day worldwide fascination with this iconic blossom.
Critic reviews
“Abe tells the remarkable tale of how this once-ubiquitous tree was on the verge of extinction in the 1920s. Its salvation came in the form of a member of the British gentry, one Collingwood Ingram, whose cherry-tree devotion led to the creation of a massive arboretum in Britain and an advocacy of cherry-tree culture that spread throughout the world. Combining vast historical research, perceptive cultural interpretation, and a gift for keen, biographical storytelling, Abe’s study of one man’s passion for a singular plant species celebrates the beneficial impact such enthusiasts can have on the world at large.” (Booklist)
"The story of the connection that linked one man, one flower, and two countries. Lovers of the outdoors, especially gardeners, will find much to enjoy in Japanese journalist Abe’s first English-language book, which won the Nihon Essayist Club Award in 2016. The author engagingly chronicles the travels and plant-collecting adventures of Collingwood Ingram.... Interspersed throughout the book are pieces of Japan’s history over the last 2,000 years, and Abe provides sufficient detail to edify but never to bore. The author clearly shows the national importance of the cherry tree and how its perception changed with Westernization.... This charming book shows how indebted the world is to Ingram.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Seamlessly told, elegant.... Firmly anchoring its major theme - the protagonist's lifelong love of Japanese cherry blossoms - at the book's center, Naoko Abe, a prominent journalist, has delivered a splendid gift: at once a moving personal account as well as a cultural, social and political history of a turbulent period in world history.... As beautiful as the trees [Ingram] studied.” (Nature)
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Performance
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For millennia humans have tried - and often failed - to master nature and transcend our limits. But this has started to change. The new scientific frontier is the human body: the greatest engineers of our generation have turned their sights inward, and their work is beginning to revolutionize mankind. In The Body Builders, Adam Piore takes us on a fascinating journey into the field of bioengineering and paints a vivid portrait of the people at its center.
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Facinating
- By Connor on 07-21-23
By: Adam Piore
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You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live
- Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America
- By: Paul Kix
- Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln-Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?
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Riveting!
- By Joy on 05-29-23
By: Paul Kix
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April 1945
- The Hinge of History
- By: Craig Shirley
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 17 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historian and New York Times best-selling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leading superpower.
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Amazing.
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-22
By: Craig Shirley
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The Founders' Key
- The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It
- By: Dr. Larry Arnn
- Narrated by: Van Tracy
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, reveals this integral unity of the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, they form the pillars upon which the liberties and rights of the American people stand. United, they have guided history's first self-governing nation, forming our government under certain universal and eternal principles. Unfortunately, the effort to redefine government to reflect "the changing and growing social order" has gone very far toward success.
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Linking Declaration and Constitution.
- By Ed Bethune on 04-26-24
By: Dr. Larry Arnn
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The Kitchen Whisperers
- Cooking with the Wisdom of Our Friends
- By: Dorothy Kalins
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The cooking lessons that stick with us are rarely the ones we read in books or learn through blog posts or YouTube videos (depending on your generation); they're the ones we pick up as we spend time with good cooks in the kitchen. Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of Saveur magazine, calls the people who pass on their cooking wisdom her Kitchen Whisperers. Consciously or not, they help make us the cooks we are—and help show the way to the kind of cooks we have the potential to become.
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needs an accompanying PDF of recipes
- By Linda on 10-29-21
By: Dorothy Kalins
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No Dig
- Nurture Your Soil to Grow Better Veg with Less Effort
- By: Charles Dowding
- Narrated by: Charles Dowding
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Transform a weedy plot into a thriving vegetable garden by following simple steps achieved in a few hours and with plants in the ground from day one. The crucial factor is understanding that not only is there no need to dig over the soil, but by minimizing intervention you are actively boosting soil productivity. This is the essence of the No Dig system that Charles Dowding has perfected over a lifetime growing vegetables.
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Charles is jaunty and uplifting.
- By Justin Marchant on 02-25-23
By: Charles Dowding
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Butcher's Work
- True Crime Tales of American Murder and Madness
- By: Harold Schechter
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.
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Another necessary work by Schector
- By Brandon on 12-27-22
By: Harold Schechter
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Devoured
- From Chicken Wings to Kale Smoothies - How What We Eat Defines Who We Are
- By: Sophie Egan
- Narrated by: Ann Richardson
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Food writer and Culinary Institute of America director Sophie Egan takes listeners on an eye-opening journey through the American food psyche, examining the connections between the values that define our national character - work, freedom, and progress - and our eating habits, the good and the bad. Egan explores why these values make for such an unstable and often unhealthy food culture and, paradoxically, why they also make America's cuisine so great.
By: Sophie Egan
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A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
- A Year of Keeping Bees
- By: Helen Jukes
- Narrated by: Mandy Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her 30s and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London - a beekeeper - on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. This is a subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves.
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Love the story and information
- By Engraving Ladi on 08-26-23
By: Helen Jukes
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Adults in the Room
- My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment
- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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What happens when you take on the establishment? In Adults in the Room, renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis gives the full, blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth.
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Very interesting but listen with caution.
- By Dimitris on 10-08-19
By: Yanis Varoufakis
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The Money Hackers
- How a Group of Misfits Took on Wall Street and Changed Finance Forever
- By: Daniel P. Simon
- Narrated by: Jakob Lewis
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Every day, businesses, investors, and consumers are grappling with the seismic changes technology has brought to the banking and finance industry. The Money Hackers is the dramatic story of fintech’s major players and explores how these disruptions are transforming even money itself.
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Quick tour, some context, lots of touts
- By Philo on 07-27-21
By: Daniel P. Simon
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The End of the Myth
- From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
- By: Greg Grandin
- Narrated by: Eric Pollins
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall.
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The chickens are coming home to roost
- By MJ on 04-21-19
By: Greg Grandin
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Indentured
- The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA
- By: Joe Nocera, Ben Strauss
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athletes involved in the two biggest college sports, men's basketball and football, are little more than indentured servants. Millions of teenagers accept scholarships to chase their dreams of fame and fortune - at the price of absolute submission to the whims of an organization that puts their interests dead last.
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An Armament agnst NCAA: Enlightening, Infuriating
- By W Perry Hall on 03-15-16
By: Joe Nocera, and others
What listeners say about The Sakura Obsession
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- david y muramatsu
- 07-24-23
Wonderful book!
I really enjoyed learning about the history of Japanese cherries, the changing Japanese culture, and people who loved both.
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- DM2010
- 12-01-21
AWESOME 👌
I love cherry blossoms so this book was just for me! I knew a lot about them in the beginning but I learned more from this book. I am also a person who enjoys nature,animals,and writing so even though I usually don't like to read this book might have just changed that! I would highly recommend this book for people who are like me or trying to find the book that might help them get interested in reading.
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1 person found this helpful