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A Gentleman from Japan
The Untold Story of an Incredible Journey from Asia to Queen Elizabeth’s Court
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Narrated by:
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Gary Furlong
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By:
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Thomas Lockley
About this listen
An incredible sea story that turns the Age of Exploration on its head, following the first Japanese man to set foot on North America and England.
On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Christopher’s epic sea voyage had spanned from Japan, via the Philippines, New Spain (Mexico), Java and Southern Africa. On the way, he had already become the first recorded Japanese person in North America. Now Christopher was the first ever Japanese visitor to England, and no other would leave such a legacy for centuries to come.
The story of Christopher is almost utterly forgotten and has never been fully told before.
A Gentleman from Japan is a fast-paced, historical narrative of adventure, cross-cultural endeavor, intellectual exchange, perseverance, espionage and conflict in the Age of Exploration.
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Story
Storyland begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants, covers the founding of Britain, England, Wales, and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans. These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape, and the yearning to belong, inhabited by characters now half-remembered: Arthur, Brutus, Albina, and more.
By: Amy Jeffs
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Short Life in a Strange World
- Birth to Death in 42 Panels
- By: Toby Ferris
- Narrated by: Jot Davies
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2012, facing the death of his father and impending fatherhood, Toby Ferris set off on a seemingly quixotic mission to track down and look at - in situ - every painting still in existence by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the most influential and important artist of Northern Renaissance painting. The result of that pursuit is a remarkable journey through major European cities and across continents. As Ferris takes a keen analytical eye to the paintings, each piece brings new revelations about Bruegel’s art, and gives way to meditations on mortality, fatherhood, and life.
By: Toby Ferris
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The Age of Wood
- Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization
- By: Roland Ennos
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood.
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Great text; poor narration
- By Richard Yates on 08-03-21
By: Roland Ennos
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Rome
- By: Matthew Kneale
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Rome, the Eternal City. Today visitors can stand on bridges that Julius Caesar and Cicero crossed; walk around temples in the footsteps of emperors; visit churches from the earliest days of Christianity. This is all the more remarkable considering what the city has endured. It has been ravaged by fires, floods, earthquakes, and - most of all - by roving armies. Matthew Kneale uses seven of these crisis moments to create a powerful and captivating account of Rome’s extraordinary history. He paints portraits of the city before each assault, describing how Romans, both rich and poor, lived their everyday lives.
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Lack of language skills an irritation
- By lmc on 07-16-18
By: Matthew Kneale
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Heaven's Command
- An Imperial Progress - Pax Britannica, Volume 1
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’s epic story of the British Empire from the accession of Queen Victoria to the death of Winston Churchill. It is a towering achievement: informative, accessible, entertaining and written with all her usual bravura. Heaven’s Command, the first volume, takes us from the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The story moves effortlessly across the world, from the English shores to Fiji, Zululand, the Canadian prairies and beyond.
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Review for all three in the series
- By Cookie on 05-14-12
By: Jan Morris
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In Miniature
- How Small Things Illuminate the World
- By: Simon Garfield
- Narrated by: Adrian Scarborough
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.
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Delightful exploration of miniatures
- By RJ on 05-30-19
By: Simon Garfield
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The Birth of Classical Europe
- A History from Troy to Augustine
- By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
- By David I. Williams on 01-12-14
By: Simon Price, and others
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Britain's War
- Volume 1, Into Battle, 1937-1941
- By: Daniel Todman
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 35 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The most terrible emergency in Britain's history, the Second World War, required an unprecedented national effort. An exhausted country had to fight an unexpectedly long war and found itself much diminished amongst the victors. The outcome of the war was nonetheless a triumph, not least for a political system that proved well adapted to the demands of a total conflict and for a population who had to make many sacrifices but who were spared most of the horrors experienced in the rest of Europe.
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Great Performance, Biased with out a warning!
- By dell992 on 06-21-16
By: Daniel Todman
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Under Pressure
- Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine
- By: Richard Humphreys
- Narrated by: Richard Humphreys
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s it like to spend three months without sunlight, sharing what little space you have with over 100 fellow crewmen and more firepower than all the bombs dropped in World War II combined? As a restless and adventurous 18-year-old, Richard Humphreys joined the Royal Navy submarine service. For five years during the Cold War, he served on the nuclear sub HMS Resolution. Nothing could have prepared him for life beneath the waves.
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Not for me
- By GEORGE on 10-18-20
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The Zookeepers' War
- An Incredible True Story from the Cold War
- By: J. W. Mohnhaupt, Shelley Frisch
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the East Berlin zoo was spacious and lush, a socialist utopia where everything was perfectly planned...and then rarely successfully finished. Berlin’s two zoos quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race - rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, competing to have the most pandas and hippos.
By: J. W. Mohnhaupt, and others
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Fragile Cargo
- The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City
- By: Adam Brookes
- Narrated by: Adam Brookes
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The magnificent collections contain a million pieces of art—objects that carry China’s deepest and most ancient memories. Among them are irreplaceable artefacts: exquisite paintings on silk, rare Ming porcelain, and the extraordinary Stone Drums of Qin, which are adorned with 2,500-year-old inscriptions of cultural significance.
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Beautiful attention to details
- By Cindy O on 09-22-24
By: Adam Brookes
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Kokoro
- Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived
- By: Beth Kempton
- Narrated by: Beth Kempton
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Join author Beth Kempton on a life-changing pilgrimage through rural Japan in search of answers to some of life's biggest questions: How do we find calm in the chaos and beauty in the darkness? How do we let go of the past and stop worrying about the future? What can an awareness of impermanence teach us about living well?
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Incredible sharing of wisdom
- By Shelly Neto, RN on 11-10-24
By: Beth Kempton
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The Incorruptibles
- A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld
- By: Dan Slater
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 1900s, prior to World War I, New York City was a vortex of vice and corruption. On the Lower East Side, then the most crowded ghetto on earth, Eastern European Jews formed a dense web of crime syndicates. Gangs of horse poisoners and casino owners, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and thugs, jockeyed for dominance while their family members and neighbors toiled in the unregulated garment industry. But when the notorious murder of a gambler attracted global attention, a coterie of affluent German-Jewish uptowners decided to take matters into their own hands.
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Wow!!!!
- By Elizabth Groberio on 08-30-24
By: Dan Slater
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Fallen Idols
- Twelve Statues That Made History
- By: Alex von Tunzelmann
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past.
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Interesting Read
- By Michelle on 01-23-22
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Salmon P. Chase
- Lincoln's Vital Rival
- By: Walter Stahr
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 27 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.
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Very inspiring and insightful
- By Mike Haverty on 06-20-23
By: Walter Stahr
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The Evil Hours
- A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
- By: David J. Morris
- Narrated by: Alex Knox
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Just as polio loomed over the 1950s, and AIDS stalked the 1980s and ’90s, posttraumatic stress disorder haunts us in the early years of the twenty-first century. Over a decade into the United States’ “global war on terror,” PTSD afflicts as many as 30 percent of the conflict’s veterans. But the disorder’s reach extends far beyond the armed forces. In total, some twenty-seven million Americans are believed to be PTSD survivors. Yet to many of us, the disorder remains shrouded in mystery, secrecy, and shame.
By: David J. Morris
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The Organ Thieves
- The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South
- By: Chip Jones
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.
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Not your story to tell
- By Bianca S on 11-22-20
By: Chip Jones
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The Cleopatras
- The Forgotten Queens of Egypt
- By: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
- Narrated by: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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One of history’s most iconic figures, Cleopatra is rightly remembered as a clever and charismatic ruler. But few today realize that she was the last in a long line of Egyptian queens who bore that name. In The Cleopatras, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the dramatic story of these seven incomparable women, vividly recapturing the lost world of Hellenistic Egypt and tracing the kingdom’s final centuries before its fall to Rome.
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Thorough on events, weak on analysis
- By Christopher Riedel on 07-30-24
What listeners say about A Gentleman from Japan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- K J K
- 06-11-24
Wonderful storytelling
The release timing of the book coincides with the beautiful FX series Shogun which left me wanting more from this time period. Written in just enough detail to wisk me away rather than getting caught in the weeds. Truly amazing to learn how this young man was so pivotal to our western world.
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