Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong

Book Description

The relocation of Shanghai cotton mills to Hong Kong after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 was an event of major significance for Hong Kong's postwar economy. Focusing on the relationship between ethnicity and entrepreneurship, this book is a major contribution to the
understanding of industrial management, in general, and the Chinese industrial base in Hong Kong in particular.

Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford Paperbacks)

Average customer rating:

A masterpiece of scholarship, dense but very extremely well done
How So Many Irish Became American
Pretty thorough look at the Irish Diaspora
Why did our ancestors emigrate? Why did some wait so long?
You don't have to be Irish to read this book...

Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford Paperbacks)
Kerby A. Miller
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Social History | Historical Study | History | Subjects | Books

Civil Rights & Liberties | Current Events | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Emigration & Immigration | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Emigration & Immigration | Administrative Law | Law | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America
Journey of Hope: The Story of Irish Immigration to America
Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred
Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)
The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849

ASIN: 0195051874

Book Description

Rich in human detail, penetrating in analysis, this book is social history on an epic scale. The first "transatlantic" history of the Irish, Emigrants and Exiles offers the fullest account yet of the diverse waves of Irish emigration to North America. Drawing on enormous original research, Miller focuses on the thought and behavior of the "ordinary" Irish emigrants, as revealed in their personal letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs as well as in their songs, poems and folklore. Miller shows that the exile mentality was deeply rooted in Irish history, culture and personality, and it profoundly affected both the traumatic course of modern Irish history and the Irish experience in America.

Customer Reviews:

A masterpiece of scholarship, dense but very extremely well done.......2006-08-25

I can not say if this is the best book on the subject, because I have not read the other books. I can say that this book is absolutely magnificient scholarship. Its subject is the Irish in America, and it gives a masterful presentation of the history of these people, both in Ireland and in America. This book is not a light read. It is very dense, and rather long. For readers with a serious interest in the subject, however, it is very rewarding to read.

How So Many Irish Became American.......2004-02-14

Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America is a well documented history of the emigration of more than seven million Irish people who left Eire for North America in five time periods from pre-Revolutionary days to 1921. Author Kerby Miller's research included more than 750 sources in both public and privately held collections in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Canada, 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia as well as more than 5,000 emigrants' letters, memoirs, poems, songs and folklore.

Miller begins and ends the book with recollections of Irish oral tradition to help understand the essence of the Irish emigration experience. He refers to Irish poems, songs and ballads from as early as the 11th century to explain an almost original sin-like belief that all Irish are exiles whether they emigrated or not. He explains how the Irish wake became a metaphor for the departure of the emigrants. In the last moments before Maura O'Sullivan left her mother's cottage to begin her journey to America, the old women of the village gathered `round to sing a mournful goodbye that just as easily could have been a funeral dirge: "Oh, musha, Maura, how shall I live after you when the long winter's night will be here and you not coming to the door nor your laughter to be heard!"

By the 1830s, less than 10,000 families literally owned Ireland, with several hundred of the wealthiest proprietors and large tenants monopolizing the bulk of the land. The Irish Diaspora flowed from an extreme concentration of property and power in an agrarian, export-based economy where too many people competed for too few jobs. In 1841, 80 percent of the more than 8.1 million Irish lived in communities of less than 20 houses. Most people were forced to lead lives of impoverished subsistence agriculture, poorly paid urban common labor or to emigrate.

Miller says Irish country people were "preliterate;" that is, they were illiterate while preserving a rich oral tradition and robust cultural heritage through their Gaelic language. Gaelic tradition had been sustained in Ireland by hereditary storytellers and poets who met in "courts of poetry" at farmhouses where established bards judged the compositions of their successors. Hundreds of thousands of Gaelic speakers emigrated to North America.

Music and dancing also played a prominent role in rural Irish culture from whence most emigrants came. Miller says visitors were often astonished that people so poor could exhibit such skill and spontaneous pleasure in song and dance. He quotes a traveling Englishman who observed, "We frog-blooded English dance as if the practice were not congenial to us, but here they moved as if dancing had been the business of their lives."

Prior to 1815, most Irish emigrants either were able to pay their passages or "emigrated for nothing" as indentured servants. After that, overseas demand for indentured servants practically disappeared while opportunities to earn livable wages in Ireland continued to deteriorate. A pattern of family chain migration developed that financed over half of all Irish migration after 1840.

In 1845, Ireland's population was about 8.5 million. Ten years later, after the worst of the Famine, it stood at 6 million. Many had died from starvation and disease, but most had emigrated to North America. Those who arrived in North America were temperamentally as well as economically less prepared for assimilation into their new lives abroad because of their strong peasant heritage. One Irish emigrant wrote, "Had I fallen from the clouds amongst this people, I could not feel more isolated, more bewildered." Another wrote, "We are a primitive people wandering wildly in a strange land ..."

Miller tells us at least 200,000 Irishmen served in the U.S. Civil War, the vast majority for the Union, which paid lucrative bounties to many recruits. He shares a letter from emigrant Thomas McManus to his family in Ireland in which Thomas assured them he wasn't forced to enlist, but "by `Gor' the bounty was very tempting and I enlisted the first day I came here." Thomas sent $350 of the $700 he received for joining up to help his family in Ireland. $700 was more than ten years' wages for an Irish laborer at the time.

Irish-Catholic immigrants brought their own factions, secret societies, sports and boisterous wakes to their neighborhoods and work sites in North America. Vicious battles over employment opportunities and territory were common among rival bands of workers from different parts of Ireland, as well as between the Irish and workers of other nationalities. The Irish were always sensitive to anti-Irish prejudice, symbolized by the "No Irish Need Apply" slogan, the source of which apparently was a song from England. Irish clannishness was often expressed in allegiance to strong-willed, often stridently Irish priests, to Irish street gangs, volunteer fire companies, political clubs and frequent mob actions against non-Irish competitors. The St. Patrick's Day observance was celebrated to extol Irish Catholic solidarity and build political strength.

This is not to say Irish Catholic immigrants were unified. On the contrary, Miller shows how they were deeply divided in several ways. Significant differences existed between Irish- and American-born generations, between different waves of emigrants in different stages of adaptation and affluence and between those who earned formal educational credentials and those who pursued trades and manual labor. Other factions arose between the English-speaking majority and the approximately half-million who still spoke Irish. Gender equality was also a prevalent issue between Irish men and women. In fact, Miller reports Irish-American women enjoyed significantly greater upward mobility and more successful adjustment to American society than did their male peers.

Kerby Miller's work is unquestionably a rich treasure of outstanding historical scholarship. It should occupy prime space on the shelf of anyone interested in emigration generally or the histories of the United States, Canada, Australia, England and any other country in which Irish emigrants have settled.

Pretty thorough look at the Irish Diaspora.......2001-12-31

An excellent book covering the migration out of Ireland. Miller looks at the different time periods and at the different kinds of immigration, and traces the idea of emigration as "exile." Great background materials are included, as well as good statistical appendices and notes.

Why did our ancestors emigrate? Why did some wait so long?.......2000-08-25

Many of us tracing our Irish ancestry will never really know our forebears - we may learn their names and the dates and places of their births and deaths - but we will never know who they really were. It is to sources such as this book that we must turn to flesh out the picture of the Irish emigrant and the forces that drove them from their homes - economic, social, cultural, and psychological, as well as their reactions to and rationalizations of those forces. We must then apply this information on the Irish emigrant milieu to the framework of knowledge of our specific forebears. The book has given me a plausible explanation as to why my County Mayo ancestors did not emigrate until the 1880's while so many from other parts of Ireland came over much sooner. Dr. Miller is quite detailed in his discussion of the differences in the adherence to traditional Irish culture and the Irish language that existed between the inhabitants of western Ireland and the remainder of the island. A must-read for any geneaologist seeking their Irish roots!

You don't have to be Irish to read this book..........2000-05-13

I'm not Irish and I didn't have to read this book as part of a course. I read the book because I'm interesed in U.S. immigration, and find it necessary to understand refugee movements past and present. I'm also concerned about the 'problems'in Northern Ireland.

This book is a hard slog but a fairly good read. I read 10-15 pages at lunch every day and finally got through it. It's a very informative book, and quite illuminating.

The British undoubtedly caused many of the problems the Irish experienced in the past and continue to experience today. However, the Irish have had a hard time letting go of the past. What is to be done? One cannot make the past different, only the present. Although one might sympathize with the Catholic Irish, and even the IRA, the future must be different. Protestants are not going back to England or Scotland. In fact, they can no more return than those of British or Scotish descent living in North Carolina can go back to the U.K.

Book Description

Bolt uses the relationship between China and Southeast Asia's ethnic Chinese as a case study, and he focuses on the potential role of a diaspora in the economic and political development of its "homeland" as well as the role of the state in dealing with transnational economic actors. He examines China's post-1978 policy of attracting ethnic Chinese investment in light of historical relations between China and its diaspora community, demonstrating that China has, through various measures, consistently aimed at tapping the resources of Asia's ethnic Chinese. He then analyzes the contributions that ethnic Chinese have made to China's development, showing that such contributions have been tremendously important both in terms of the accumulation of capital and the transfer of business skills. Bolt probes how ethnic Chinese intervention in China's economy has affected the politics of the Chinese state. He concludes by looking at the international implications of Chinese development being spurred largely by a Chinese diaspora community, and he demonstrates how China's efforts to attract ethnic Chinese investments have complicated China's relations with Southeast Asia and led to discussions of a "Greater China." An important analysis for scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with contemporary Southeast Asian and Chinese political, military, and economic issues.

Rhineland Emigrants Lists of German Settlers in Colonial America (#6540)

Average customer rating:

Rhineland Emigrants Lists of German Settlers in Colonial America (#6540)

Manufacturer: Clearfield Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Genealogy | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0806309342

Book Description

This is a collection of articles pertaining to the European origins of Pennsylvania German immigrants which originally appeared in the magazine Pennsylvania Folklife, successor to The Pennsylvania Dutchman.

Virtually all the emigrants mentioned in this work are cited with reference to church, parish, and provincial records and other records located in the archival repositories of the old Palatinate and adjoining provinces in southwest Germany; and these emigrants are cited again, where possible, with reference to a corresponding range of Pennsylvania source materials, notably church records, wills, and tax lists. In addition, names of emigrants are collated with Strassburger and Hinke's celebrated Pennsylvania German Pioneers, from which are drawn dates of arrival, names of ships, and other evidence of immigration.

More Emigrants in Bondage: 1614-1775
Average customer rating:
More Emigrants in Bondage: 1614-1775
Peter Wilson Coldham
Manufacturer: Genealogical Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Genealogy | Reference | Subjects | Books
General | Reference | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

(GW 1098) The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775

ASIN: 0806316942

The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed; and Others Who Went From Great Britain to the American Plantation, 1600-1700
Average customer rating:
The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed; and Others Who Went From Great Britain to the American Plantation, 1600-1700
John Camden Hotten
Manufacturer: Heritage Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | World | History | Subjects | Books
General | England | Europe | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0788418149

Product Description

The title says it all! This extensive volume of transcriptions offers a collection of the names of the emigrant ancestors of many thousands of American families. In the ample introduction, Mr. Hotten states his "object is simply and briefly to point out some of the causes which contributed to the early emigration of English families to America; and then to estimate the practical value of the contents of the present volume as a means of assistance in making genealogical researches in the mother country." Transcribed records include: a multitude of ships' passenger lists; indexes of the Patent Rolls; lists of the living and dead in Virginia (February 16, 1623); musters of the inhabitants of Virginia; lists of convicted rebels (Monmouth Rebellion of 1685) sent to the Barbadoes and other plantations in America; Barbadoes Parish registers with birth and death records, lists of inhabitants, and landowners; and much, much more. A seventy-two-page full name index greatly enhances the value of this outstanding genealogical reference book.

Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch Emigrants

Average customer rating:

Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch Emigrants
Hylke Speerstra
Manufacturer: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

All Amazon Upgrade | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

Literature & Fiction | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Amazon Upgrade | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
The Whistling Season

ASIN: 0802828019

Book Description

Cruel Paradise deftly weaves together the firsthand stories of men and women who emigrated from the Netherlands throughout the twentieth century. A skilled stylist with an unassuming presence, Hylke Speerstra brings readers along as he circles the globe interviewing transplanted Netherlanders in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Combining elements of memoir and travelogue, his narrative speaks to universal human experience as it vividly recounts the trials and successes of these emigrants. Common themes of personal identity and family, uprootedness and loss, nostalgia and bittersweet joy run throughout the book. Yet these emigrants have had very diverse life experiences. Some have become affluent beyond imagining, brushing elbows with Rockefellers, Kennedys, and movie producers; others have spent the better part of a lifetime eking out their living as farmers. Often poignant, sometimes amusing, always memorable, these stories provide a moving tribute to those who left their homeland behind with little more than uncertain hopes for their children. Cruel Paradise will interest all readers of memoirs or travel literature, especially those with Dutch connections or with emigrant tales of their own.

Emigrants: The Emigrant Novels Book 1 (The Emigrant Novels / Vilhelm Moberg, Book 1)

Average customer rating:

A masterpiece...
Apropos of Today
A great read
Honored Ancestors
HISTORICAL FICTION ABOUT 19TH CENTURY SWEDISH EMIGRATION...

Emigrants: The Emigrant Novels Book 1 (The Emigrant Novels / Vilhelm Moberg, Book 1)
Vilhelm Moberg
Manufacturer: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

German | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Unto a Good Land (The Emigrants, Book II)
The Settlers (The Emigrant Novels, Book 3)
The Last Letter Home (The Emigrant Novels / Vilhelm Moberg, Book 4)
A History of the Swedish People: Volume II: From Renaissance to Revolution
Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (Perennial Classics)

ASIN: 0873513193

Book Description

Book One introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their 3 young children, and 11 others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Smland in 1850.

Customer Reviews:

A masterpiece..........2006-09-08

I was born in Sweden and grew up in France (Swedish mom, French dad). I now live in the US and finally decided to read this book. I am currently starting the 3rd one and can not get my hand of it.

The Emigrants is an amazing piece of art, a book with so many themes, characters and information! The book is at times very grim, but also shows some strong optimism regarding condition improvement.

I would recommend this book to everybody with a Swedish background, but also anybody whose ancestors immigrated to America during the 19th century, and more generally anybody interested in the subject and looking for a great read. You'll get so attached to the Nilsson family you won't be able to stop reading.

Apropos of Today.......2006-06-03

This book describes the Swedish emmigration to the US in the mid 1800's when one quarter of the Swedish population left for the US. One quarter! This book will give you insight into the myriad of reasons and the myriad of personality types that made the arduous and life threatening journey. If you've ever thought of the Swedish as all being the same, don't. If you've ever thought that sweet little Sweden couldn't have social problems, don't.

This book is appropriate to the current spirited discussion of illegal Mexican immigration into the US. It is a good way to understand a big event in Swedish history as well as something about the causes of human migrations. On top of that the book is sad -- a Grapes of Wrath sort of sad.....

BTW, I gave this book 4 stars but in general I give fewer stars that the average reviewer.....I'm a harhser critic.

A great read.......2005-12-28

I received this book as a gift from our Swedish exchange student's parents. It was wonderful! Finished it in a day and am now after the other three.

While it may or may not totally accurately portray Sweden, it is historical FICTION and most of it tracks with what I know of European history in general. Of course I cannot read it in the original Swedish, but the translated version does flow well.

Now I can't wait to find out what happens to Karl Oskar and his family!

Honored Ancestors.......2005-03-13

This book will always be one of my favorites. Moberg not only tells the story of an immigrant family, he reveals the pioneer heart. While the story continues to move at a good pace, you are still invited to feel character's aspirations and doubt, courage and fear, pride, failure, love, regret and forgiveness.
I finished the first book and could not stop thinking about Oskar and Kristina. I had to finish the series. I am sure that to a small degree I was prejudiced because four of my great grandparents came from Sweden. In the second book, late one night Oskar comforts his wife, "Kristina, I believe that one day our children and even great-grandchildren will thank us." I do.

HISTORICAL FICTION ABOUT 19TH CENTURY SWEDISH EMIGRATION..........2003-12-07

This is an epic work by its Swedish author. Translated from Swedish into English, this beautifully written book of historical fiction was first published in the early nineteen fifties and met with rave reviews at the time. It is part of a four part opus, the first of which is "The Emigrants". It is followed by three additional books, "Unto a Good Land", "The Settlers", and "Last Letter From Home".

In this, the first volume, the author lays the ground work for the emigration of a Swedish family, grounding it in the reasons for the exodus of so many Swedes from their mother country in the middle of the 19th century. The focus of the book is on the family, relatives, and friends of Karl Oscar Nilsson, a peasant farmer who unceasingly worked his farm, only to find that, no matter what he did, he could not progress and would continue to live on the cusp of total poverty. Gathering up his family and friends of the family, he decides to take the monumental step of making a fresh start by emigrating to the new world, specifically the United States of America.

The book focuses on the set backs the Nilsson family encounters in Sweden, as it is their travails that act as the catalyst for such journey. The book grounds the reader in the Swedish social and religious mores of the time, and the impact that such would have on this particular group of people. The author enables the reader to understand why some would risk all to begin life anew in an unknown part of the world.

This book is the story of the first leg of their journey, which takes the reader through the nature of their lives in Sweden, the decision to make such a journey, and their sea voyage to the new world. I enjoyed the first volume so much that I look forward to continuing that journey with them by reading the remaining three volumes.

Average customer rating:

The Emigrants

Shadows of the past

Memorable

Sebald, the Last Great Writer of the Twentieth Century

Weaves in and out of memory

The Emigrants
W. G. Sebald , and Michael Hulse
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Rings of Saturn

Austerlitz (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Vertigo Vertigo

Lucy: A Novel

On the Natural History of Destruction (Modern Library Paperbacks)

ASIN: 0811213668

Amazon.com

A meditation on memory and loss. Sebald re-creates the lives of four exiles--five if you include his oblique self-portrait--through their own accounts, others' recollections, and pictures and found objects. But he brings these men before our eyes only to make them fade away, "longing for extinction." Two were eventual suicides, another died in an asylum, the fourth still lived under a "poisonous canopy" more than 40 years after his parents' death in Nazi Germany.

Sebald's own longing is for communion. En route to Ithaca (the real upstate New York location but also the symbolic one), he comes to feel "like a travelling companion of my neighbor in the next lane." After the car speeds away--"the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window--I felt deserted and desolate for a time." Sebald's narrative is purposely moth-holed (butterfly-ridden, actually--there's a recurring Nabokov-with-a-net type), an escape from the prison-house of realism. According to the author, his Uncle Ambros's increasingly improbable tales were the result of "an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions." Luckily for us, Sebald seems to have inherited the same syndrome. --Kerry Fried

Book Description

Published to enormous critical acclaim in the US and sold out immediately in its first hardcover edition, The Emigrants has been acclaimed as "one of the best novels to appear since World War II" (Review of Contemporary Fiction) and three times chosen as the1996 International Book of the Year. The poignant and acclaimed novel about the beauty of lost things, while the protagonist traces the lives of four elderly German/Jewish exiles. The Emigrants is composed of four long narratives which at first appear to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of several Jewish exiles in England, Austria, and America. The narrator literally follows their footsteps, studding each story with photographs and creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album. But gradually, Sebald's prose, which combines documentary description with almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts a new magic, and the four stories merge into one. Illustrated throughout with enigmatic photographs.

Customer Reviews:

The Emigrants.......2007-09-09

The Emigrants is a novel in the form of four biographical episodes. The narrator, according to the details of his own life story, is Sebald himself. Three of the four subjects are men whom he supposedly meets at various points in his life; the fourth is he great uncle. The biographies have an air of authenticity due in no small part to the photographs which illustrate the text.

The common theme linking these four men is that they have emigrated from their German-speaking homeland. Two of them are Jewish and left as a direct result of Nazi anti-Semitism. The third (the first in sequence) is presumably Jewish as well and left for the same reasons, but I don't believe it is spelled out in the text. The fourth, the great-uncle, is also Jewish but left Germany for economic reasons.

In each case there is a pervasive air of nostalgia in the subject's recollection of his past. It is the memory of times past, rather than the Jewishness or German-ness of the characters, that is the pervasive theme of the novel. "Memory," says the great-uncle in his journal, "often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time, but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds."

I've read three novels by Sebald (the others being Austerlitz and Rings of Saturn), and they are very similar in style, concept and mood. The style is very readable despite long paragraphs and the absence of quotation marks. The concept in each case is an exploration of the past set in an autobiographical context and illustrated with black and white photographs. The mood is universal melancholy. There is a pervasive sense of loss, loneliness and decay that give Sebald's novels a haunting sense of the emptiness of modern life. This is ironic, since the past, for all its nostalgic charm, is largely characterized by war, economic deprivation, and anti-Semitism.

Despite its typically rambling nature, and the complete absence of any conventional plot, The Emigrants is compulsive reading. Sebald takes us effortlessly from an English garden of the 1980's, to a German schoolroom of the 1930's , to Istanbul in 1913, and to bustling Manchester in the 1920's - just to name a few locales. The wide range of characters, economically portrayed, includes fascinating and realistic men and women from various time periods and nationalities.

After reading The Emigrants, one is left with a nagging sense of disquiet bordering on remorse, as though Sebald's past were our own and the truths that will make sense of it all are hidden just out of sight in the mists of time.

Shadows of the past.......2007-09-08

Memories have a strange way of clinging to people, appearing haphazardly and intermittently. Other times they may roll over an individual with such insistence it changes the course of their life. Often the mind modifies recollections over time, suggesting altered fragments of past realities when they return. Sebald is a master of searching out lost or hidden memories. In a format that goes beyond the traditional genres, he merges memoir, biography, travelogue and fiction. In an often elegiac, yet precise language with great attention to detail, he takes the reader on a winding road of discovery. He creates patterns and builds connections out of incidents and places that initially appear disjointed. In The Emigrants he applies his unique writing style and descriptive technique to the fullest.

The book consists of four independent narratives portraying four very different individuals within their social and historical context. Yet, each of them is profoundly connected to a past that each cannot escape. The oblique references to the disturbing events of the twentieth century - the two World Wars, the Holocaust - linger like a shadow behind the characters, having deeply scarred their existence. The narrator, who in part, or entirely, could be Sebald himself, is an inquisitive researcher into his subjects' lives. In his quest to comprehend each of them, he imagines himself in their shoes, traveling through many villages, towns and countries, tracing their wanderings, probing in depth their temporary existence away from their homeland and the reasons for giving up on their lives: the doctor, the teacher, the great uncle, and the painter. Sebald is a meticulous observer of locales in nature. His own ruminations when walking along a familiar village path or through the street maze of a city add a rare quality of authenticity to the accounts. The significance of his usually gloomy black and white photos, apparently incidental, yet deliberately placed, of buildings, landscapes, objects or people, while not identified, emerges from the narrative context and strengthens it.

With each portrait Sebald builds a more complex character study. He expands his understanding of the subject beyond his personal recollections by interviewing intermediaries, such as family and friends and sifting through their documents and photos. In an overall sense, the protagonists are characters of fiction. However, they are drawn from and shaped to a greater or lesser extend by Sebald's memory of people he knew. For example, his elementary school teacher was the basis for Paul who, as part Jewish, was prevented from teaching during the thirties and left the country only to return after the war and to end up in the village of Sebald's childhood. The most direct connection between the narrator and his subject is established in the portrait of Max Ferber, who also resembles Sebald contemporary, the painter Frank Auerbach. In conversations and joint walks through Manchester, where Sebald lived for a time, the reader can sense that his narrator might well reflects many of the author's thoughts and preoccupations at the time.

All four individuals were ordinary people formed by extraordinary circumstances. A feeling of nostalgia for a simpler and happier time permeates the stories as Sebald's narrator reminisces over diaries and photos from his subjects' collections. The reader, almost despite themselves, are drawn into these personal portraits and also the reflections on time, loss and memory as a result of the turmoil of the twentieth century. [Friederike Knabe]

Memorable.......2007-01-10

Sebald writes so well (at least the way it is translated into English) and so effortlessly that the book glides easily from one story to the other and is rather easy to read. The Emigrants has an elegiac quality that constantly pulls you into lost realms. I really liked reading his book and discovering (through Google) his allusions to German department stores and cookies, as well as his asides about Nazis. Highly recommendable but it is a sad book.

Sebald, the Last Great Writer of the Twentieth Century.......2006-08-24

W.G. Sebald, who died in a traffic accident in late 2001, was the last great writer of the 20th century. The four novels by Sebald that appeared first in German and then in English translation during the 1990's deserve a place alongside Kafka, Proust, Mann and Nabokov on the shelf devoted to the very best of Modern European literature. Sebald's second prose work, "The Emigrants" consists of four thematically related narratives, all dealing in some way with the impact of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism on modern European life. It's a magisterial work in which Sebald, like his fellow German-language artists Paul Celan and Anselm Kiefer, shows us that there can be art after Auschwitz, but it must look very different and be much darker than any art created before the horror.

Weaves in and out of memory.......2006-06-26

In a lot of ways this isn't so much a novel as four linked shorter works, all bound by a common theme. A theme that really isn't explicitly stated but haunts the inhabitants of the novel all the same. This, of course, is the Holocaust, which I don't think is even mentioned once but somehow informs the actions of everyone in the book. The novel follows the nameless narrator as he learns about the lives of four Jews who were affected by the events of years past and how it warped their lives, sometimes without them even realizing it. As other reviewers have pointed out, none of the four people detailed here make it out okay, two of them die by suicide and one is committed but the book doesn't try to make you pity them so much as understand what brought them to the points that it does. And even then it more just states the fact and steps back, letting you decide at what moment everything tipped over. Giving the book another layer, Sebald went and found (or just had lying around) a bunch of random black and white photographs, which he incorporates into the story itself, giving life to locations and adding a bit of reality to descriptions of people and whatnot, making you wonder how much of the book is true and how much he just made up. In the end the story is more about the narrator coming to grips with the legacy of what happened, as it morphs into a story within a story, coming back out just in time for the story to wrap up. Any complaints I have would be minor, maybe a stronger link between the four stories, while sharing the same narrator, a more prominent thematic link might have given the novel as a whole deeper meaning, as it doesn't add up to as much as it could have been, keeping everything so separate. And at points it becomes difficult to figure out when it switches from the narrator describing someone's monologue to the narrator himself just talking again, the lack of quotation marks makes you do some unnecesary work sometimes. But those are minor. Sebald's prose sings at times, whoever translated it made the whole affair easy to read and some portions, like the last few sentences of the third part, are just pure magic. Not exactly a masterpiece but better than merely "good" Sebald gets a lot of credit for taking a commonly written about topic and approaching it from a unique angle, describing the shape of it without even mentioning the object in question and letting the reader fill in the spaces it makes. Unfortunately I think Sebald is no longer with us (I think the first I'd heard of him was his obituary, sadly) but he did leave a few other novels which I hear are just as good or better. It's too bad he didn't give us more, but he gave us what he had and that'll have to be enough.

Emigrant Wilderness and Northwestern Yosemite

Average customer rating:

Good Book - Campsite Information
Please, Ben, go back...
Oustanding Guide

Emigrant Wilderness and Northwestern Yosemite
Ben Schifrin
Manufacturer: Wilderness Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Reference | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books

North America | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Sports | Subjects | Books

Sierra North: Backcountry Trips in Californias Sierra Nevada
The Trinity Alps: A Hiking and Backpacking Guide
Hiking California's Golden Trout Wilderness: A Guide to Backpacking and Day Hiking in the Golden Trout and South Sierra Wildernesses
Sierra South: Backcountry Trips in Californias Sierra Nevada
Lonely Planet Hiking in the Sierra Nevada

ASIN: 0899971032

Amazon.com

Bordering the northern border of California's Yosemite National Park is a wilderness area nearly forgotten by the crowds of tourists ogling the vertical face of El Capitan or the graceful curvature of Half-Dome--and therein lies its charm. This guidebook to the Emigrant Wilderness covers all the area's trails, as well as fishing options, climbing routes, mountain biking, winter recreation, natural history, and horsepacking. Also included is a handy fold-out topographic map.

Book Description

The 118,000-acre Emigrant Wilderness lies on the northern border of Yosemite National Park. This book describes 62 trail and cross-country routes in Emigrant plus adjacent Yosemite and Hoover Wilderness. Comes with a 4-color topographic map at the scale of 1:63,360.

Customer Reviews:

Good Book - Campsite Information.......2002-05-10

The copy I perused had an update for 1999. The book had a Map with trails not on my current US FS map. It showed trails which may be hard to find, but that's the challenge. Trails from old books from the 1960's are often included here, but not in current maps or US FS literature. Again, this is a great resource book for this area.

As with any wilderness area, campsites will close due to overuse, restoration, natural changes (flood, earthquake, fire, mudslides, etc). For up to date information, check with the local US Forest Station (Sometimes helpful) and local clubs. Local bulletin boards such as craigslist.org, San Francisco are helpful too.

Always obtain a permit for overnight stays. These are still required and free as of this writing for most wilderness areas.
If there is a fee write your Senator and Congress person.

Please, Ben, go back..........1999-07-12

This is a very good guide, as far as it goes, but unfortunately, that's often not nearly far enough. Much of the information is badly outdated (most of the campsites described in some areas no longer exist, for example). I've been waiting several years to get an updated edition, because we've used ours so much, it's fallen apart. Now that it's completely disintegrated, into a dozen or more pieces, I gave up and ordered another copy of the same old edition; but if you come out with a new edition, with better information, I'd get that, right away, even now.

Oustanding Guide.......1998-11-03

I have used this book several times to plan backpacking trips. The Emigrant Wilderness has quickly become my favorite area for getting away from it all. With detailed and accurate directions for finding everything, this book makes me feel like a seasoned mountain man is showing me the way. Definitely, the best trail guide I own.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books