The Last Samurai
"Ludo, age six, is a prodigy. His mother, Sibylla, raises him alone and tries hard to keep his voracious intellect satisfied, while she struggles to make ends meet. With her exasperated guidance, he teaches himself Greek, so that he can read The Odyssey, before moving on to study Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, and Japanese. And both Sibylla and Ludo share a passion for Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which they watch repeatedly, absorbing its lessons of samurai virtue. Soon Ludo embarks on a quest to find his father, and approaches seven men to test their mettle. Each of them - prominent, powerful, or flawed in his own way - has to rise to a unique challenge.". "The Last Samurai is full of stories of remarkable exploits, snatches of Greek poetry, passages of Icelandic legend, and ingenious math problems. But it also has a rare emotional depth, as Ludo's search for a father, or even a man heroic enough to be his father, gradually reveals a new and unexpected dimension of love. And at the book's heart is the relationship between mother and son, which is moving and memorable in its fusion of solidarity, frustration, and tenderness."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- I'm looking for inspiration for the Christmas holidays.
Mine were: – Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000) – William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (1991) – John Ma, Polis (2024) – John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (1982)
(Apologies if someone has posted something similar recently. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.)
- Helen DeWitt wrote another novel after The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods. It's a very different book, but definitely worth a try! Good luck!
- It's interesting to compare this story to the movie Limitless, which has a fairly similar premise, but ends on a positive note. Algernon seems to have more influence, probably because of it is fundamentally a kind of morality tale, but I actually kind of prefer Limitless, [0] as limited as its plot is.
There is something motivational about it, which is probably why there are so many YouTube productivity videos with the soundtrack. [1] I get the same feeling from The Last Samurai a book (unrelated to the Tom Cruise movie) by Helen DeWitt, which is about raising a genius child.
I don't know what the psychological effect is called, but there does seem to be something significant to the idea that it's inspiring to read about/watch extremely intelligent people flexing their intelligence.
0. The film is based on a book, The Dark Fields, which doesn't seem quite so positive, although I haven't read it.
- My recommendation for parenting book is The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Unfortunately I don't maintain a list (it's on my to-do list), but sure! Here are some good books I've read/am reading lately.
- Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion by Julian Young
- The Portable Nietzsche by Kaufmann
- A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
- The Art of the Islamic Garden by Emma Clark
- Notes on Culture by T. S. Eliot
- In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki
- The Qur'an: Oxford World Classics
- On Bohemia by Graña
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- The Individual and His Property by Stirner
- Reminds me of an excerpt from one of my favorite novels, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt:
...though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.
What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people who were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.
