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Angry White Pyjamas
Robert Twigger
€ 13.99
€ 11.44
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Description for Angry White Pyjamas
Paperback. A brilliant and captivating insight into the bizarre nature of contemporary Japan. Num Pages: 320 pages. BIC Classification: 1FPJ; 3JJPR; WSTM; WTL. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 129 x 21. Weight in Grams: 226.
A brilliant and captivating insight into the bizarre nature of contemporary Japan.
Adrift in Tokyo, teaching giggling Japanese highschool girls how to pronounce Tennyson correctly, Robert Twigger came to a revelation about himself: he'd never been fit. In a bid to escape the cockroach infestation and sweaty squalor of a cramped apartment in Fuji Heights, Twigger sets out to cleanse his body and his mind. Not knowing his fist from his elbow the author is sucked into the world of Japanese martial arts, and the brutally demanding course of budo training taken by the Tokyo Riot Police, where any ascetic motivation soon comes up against blood-stained dogis and fractured collarbones.
In Angry White Pyjamas Robert Twigger skilfully blends the ancient with the modern - the ultra-traditionalism, ritual and violence of the dojo (training academy) with the shopping malls, nightclubs and scenes of everyday Tokyo life in the twenty-first century - to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.
Product Details
Publisher
Orion Publishing Co
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2007
Condition
New
Number of Pages
320
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9780753808580
SKU
V9780753808580
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-5
About Robert Twigger
ROBERT TWIGGER has won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and the Somerset Maugham Award. His twelve books have been translated into over twenty languages and cover both fiction and non-fiction, memoir and travel. He spent a year training with the Tokyo riot police, crossed Canada in a homemade birchbark canoe and was the first person to traverse entirely on foot the Egyptian Great Sand Sea. His quarterly comic of memoir and travel, This Simple Life, is available at roberttwigger.com
Reviews for Angry White Pyjamas
A frantic, very funny, urban quest
Mail on Sunday
Wonderfully oddball ... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces
Guardian
His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue
Observer
A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain
Independent on Sunday
His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has ever writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book
Daily Mail
Brilliant ... everyone should read it
Tony Parsons
Late Review
This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts
Independent on Sunday
Poetry in motion
Sue Townsend
Sunday Times
Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience
Daily Telegraph
A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original - a rites-of-passage story, an explanation of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy
Patrick French Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trials endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey
Literary Review
The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Daily Mail
A frantic, very funny, urban quest.
Simon Garfield
Mail on Sunday
A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original - a rites-of-passage story, an explanation of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy
Patrick French His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue
The Observer
A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain
Tim Hulse
Independent on Sunday
This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts
Independent on Sunday
His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has ever writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book
Ian Wooldridge
Daily Mail
Brilliant ... everyone should read it
Tony Parsons
Late Review
Wonderfully oddball ... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces
Frank Keating
Guardian
Poetry in motion
Sue Townsend
Sunday Times
Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience
Daily Telegraph
Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trails endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey
Ben Farrington
Literary Review
The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Daily Mail
Mail on Sunday
Wonderfully oddball ... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces
Guardian
His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue
Observer
A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain
Independent on Sunday
His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has ever writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book
Daily Mail
Brilliant ... everyone should read it
Tony Parsons
Late Review
This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts
Independent on Sunday
Poetry in motion
Sue Townsend
Sunday Times
Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience
Daily Telegraph
A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original - a rites-of-passage story, an explanation of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy
Patrick French Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trials endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey
Literary Review
The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Daily Mail
A frantic, very funny, urban quest.
Simon Garfield
Mail on Sunday
A book of unexpected brilliance. It is subtle, funny, stimulating and original - a rites-of-passage story, an explanation of an alien culture, and an inspiring work of philosophy
Patrick French His fine eye for eccentricities makes this an entertaining travelogue
The Observer
A rattling good yarn and very funny into the bargain
Tim Hulse
Independent on Sunday
This is a splendidly written adventure, something sane at last on the craziness of martial arts
Independent on Sunday
His explanation of how to come to terms with intense pain should be read to every footballer who has ever writhed about in agony after a kick on the shin... It is a clever, enthralling book
Ian Wooldridge
Daily Mail
Brilliant ... everyone should read it
Tony Parsons
Late Review
Wonderfully oddball ... Here is a cult book all right, which could do for Japan and the martial arts what Hornby did for Highbury and the football terraces
Frank Keating
Guardian
Poetry in motion
Sue Townsend
Sunday Times
Communicates the existential purity of his elective regime with irrepressible passion ... it also has the unmistakable stamp of authentic experience
Daily Telegraph
Twigger vividly captures the wince-inducing physical and emotional trails endured by those who would wear the black belt. But he also offers a rare insight in aikido's peculiarly Darwinian group dynamic and how it fits into modern Japanese society. After this marvellously insightful account I will snigger no more at Steven Segal's po-faced chop-sockey
Ben Farrington
Literary Review
The most intriguing sports book ever to win the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award
Daily Mail