Shibumi
NICHOLAI HEL.... Born in the ravages of WWI China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go master, he survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and it's most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection..... shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his magnificent Eurasion mistress, Hel faces his most sinister enemy --- a super-monolith of espionage and monopoly. The battle lines are drawn, ruthless power and corruption on one side and on the other...... SHIBUMI Maybe the best book I've ever read.
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4recommend
14mentions
9people
2008–2026years
36% recommend64% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Shibumi by Trevanian. Ice Station Zebra by MacLean. Clive Cussler novels. Tom Clancy. Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour. Scaramouche and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini.
(Note: Many of these contain some really ridiculous, outdated language and treatment of various groups of people.)
- One of my all-time favorite characters is Le Cagot from Shibumi by Trevanian.
https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033
Up there with Edna from the Incredibles.
- Shibumi - Trevanian; I've read the book three of four times now and I'm not sure why but the characters and the characterizations just resonate with me.
- "Nicholai nodded and remained silent. It was the teacher's practice to speak in terms of Go whenever he dealt with anything of importance. As General Kishikawa had once said, for Otake-san life was a simplistic metaphor for Go."
If you like Go, you'll enjoy Trevanian's Shibumi.
This looks like a great documentary and on one of my favorite subjects so donation submitted.
On a different note, I think a large percentage of TV programming in the near future will be financed like this (percentage by number, there will always be expensive blockbusters). Unfortunately due to constraints, the current Kickstarter model can back mostly documentaries but not miniseries, sitcoms, action movies, etc. But if Netflix or Amazon open their streaming pipes to third party content, a la the Apple all model, I think we'll see an explosion of such content.
- Go has an intrinsic beauty that some value more than chess. In Shibumi (great book btw), young Nicholai Hel declares (http://books.google.com/books?id=Li4EzEdaX1oC&pg=PA73...):
"What Go is to philosophers and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants"
If so, why is it not as popular as chess (outside Asia)? This could be examined at length but the fact that chess was used as one of the weapons of Cold War and its long history (Go has become popular in the West only in late 20th century) all should be considered. Yet, there might be some truth to Nicholai's (aka Trevanian, aka Whitaker) observation. The antagonistic nature of chess is much easier to grasp than the cold, crystalline-like beauty of Go's patterns.
As to your comment " I don't actually think humans really were bested by computers in chess", which is shared by others on this thread: The observations that computers play "ugly chess", the "thought" process is different, etc. stem from an romantic idealization of how the grandmasters are raised and train nowadays. I would very much suggest that you read the NYer article I linked (an another commentor summarized). The basic idea there is not that computers have learned to play an ugly version of brute force chess but humans (with the aid of their computerized tools) learned how to mechanically optimize their play, getting closer to computers.
- “Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
