Kipling visited Japan in 1889 and 1892. No other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it. Kipling's newspaper dispatches from Japan were described by the great Japanologist Basil Han Chamberlain as 'the most graphic even penned by a globetrotter'. These vivid pen-pictures, together with Kipling's other writings about Japan, are now collected by Sir Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb, carefully edited with an introduction and Notes. First published in 1988, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

"Kipling was just twenty-three years old when he reached San Francisco in May 1889; he immediately began recording the sights and sounds of boom-town America. For four months he toured the United States, publishing accounts of his journey in the Pioneer, a major newspaper in western India. A few years later, when he lived in Vermont, Kipling wrote several syndicated articles published in both England and the U.S. Then in 1899 he revised and abridged the Pioneer versions and published them in From Sea to Sea. The second series of syndicated articles he collected in Letters of Travel (1920). Most of these travel writings are now out of print. In Kipling's America, Professor D. H. Stewart brings all of these articles together and reproduces the original printed versions. Readers are provided with the opportunity to hear again Kipling at his cocky and often opinionated best. From Kipling's perspective, America unleashed the chaotic energy latent in human beings, and he was uncertain whether this energy inevitably would be productive or destructive." "That some of his impressions were one-dimensional is undeniable, but equally undeniable is his gift of language - his access to a ready lexicon often composed of what he termed a "perpetual Pentecost" to describe the "talking in tongues" heard in British Overseas Clubs throughout the Empire. This hodgepodge of European languages (counter-pointed with pidgin English, Chinese, Hindi, American) produced a symphony (or cacophony) of bountiful word play."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"A Book of Words, Kipling's own selection of his speeches published in 1928, reflects a variety of topics and audiences. He spoke to schoolboys about literature, to Brazilians about "the spirit of the Latin," to the Royal Geographical Society about travel, to navy men about sailors, to ship owners about shipping, to university students about independence. The list goes on, revealing interests and activities far more various than most men of letters would ever think of undertaking. Before the end of his life Kipling added a few more speeches to the version of the book that appeared, posthumously, in the splendid Sussex Edition of his collected works. Even so, many of his speeches have remained uncollected and virtually unknown." "A Second Book of Words collects what Kipling left uncollected. The speeches in this new book date from 1884 to 1935. We see Kipling at different moments before different audiences. We hear how he talked to his Sussex neighbors, or how he addressed a parliamentary committee, or a South African election meeting, or a club of London doctors, or his fellow honorary degree recipients at Cambridge. The more substantial, formal speeches are equally various, marked by Kipling s mastery of language, a few passing over into a violent extravagance of feeling - the attack on the Liberal government in the speech of 16 May 1914 or the speech on war aims of 15 February 1918. Usually, however, the tone is urbane, the artistic aim to instruct through delight. Kipling knew that the maker of speeches and the poet were subject to the same law: "Unless they please they are not heard at all."" "A Second Book of Words adds another forty-eight speeches to the thirty-eight that Kipling chose to make public, printing all the known uncollected speeches - long or short, carefully meditated or spontaneous, tendentious or diplomatic. Another twenty-five for which no text has so far been found are identified, as are the speeches that he is known to have written for members of the royal family." "Professor Pinney, editor of the six-volume The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, brings his extensive knowledge of Kipling s life and writings to the volume with an informative introduction, headnotes to contextualize each speech, and a complete checklist of all the speeches. Altogether, the edition is a considerable contribution to Kipling s canon and to an important but neglected area of the Kipling bibliography." --Book Jacket.