AUSTRALIAN LIGHT HORSE EQUIPMENT

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel

The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancee back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken—the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: David Mitchell reinvents himself with each book, and it's thrilling to watch. His novels like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas spill over with narrators and language, collecting storylines connected more in spirit than in fact. In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, he harnesses that plenitude into a more traditional form, a historical novel set in Japan at the turn into the 19th century, when the island nation was almost entirely cut off from the West except for a tiny, quarantined Dutch outpost. Jacob is a pious but not unappealing prig from Zeeland, whose self-driven duty to blurt the truth in a corrupt and deceitful trading culture, along with his headlong love for a local midwife, provides the early engine for the story, which is confined at first to the Dutch enclave but crosses before long to the mainland. Every page is overfull with language, events, and characters, exuberantly saturated in the details of the time and the place but told from a knowing and undeniably modern perspective. It's a story that seems to contain a thousand worlds in one. --Tom Nissley

Established: July 24, 1968, Acreage: 741 acres
Richard Warthen, a native of South Carolina, acquired the property in 1850 and built the first mill in Washington County just 100 feet upstream from the present mill and dam. T.B. Rachels and his brothers purchased the property around 1895. The property was later acquired by Oscar Harrison and then sold to the Gilmore brothers who farmed much of the surrounding area. In the early 1920’s the Gilmore Brothers constructed the present dam, mill and cotton gin. Construction took one to two years and the mill was capable of grinding both wheat flour and cornmeal. The mill and adjacent store were centers for both work and community activities. The brothers sold the property to the Hall family, who then sold it to Hugh M. Tarbutton and William Rawlings. In 1968 Tarbutton and Rawlings deeded the 740 acres and all historical buildings to the state of Georgia.
Hamburg provides cultural, historical, and recreational opportunities for the public. The park continues to maintain and operate the gristmill on a regular schedule, and visitors may purchase cornmeal in the old country store. The Gin House at the park’s museum with displays of equipment and artifacts used by rural farmers in the early 1900’s. the 225 acre impoundment of Hamburg Lake provides recreational opportunities for boaters and fishermen.

The "Three Sisters", a group of thin pinnacles (see note on photograph), refer to three nuns and not to three siblings. The large spires on both sides of the smaller spire are seen as two mature nuns leading the thin young initiate between them.

Three Sisters are eroded remnants of a narrow ridge extending southwards from one corner of Mitchell Mesa. This flat-topped hill shields this part of Monument Valley from US163 further west.

This farewell episode for Joel Hodgson is a sentimental favorite but even more worth it for the hilarity spawned by our captured Satellite of Love friends. The movie centers on the hapless, big lug cop named Mitchell (Joe Don Baker), who fights the rich and powerful drug-dealing bad guys. Along the way, Mitchell finds himself investigating murder, falling "in sex" with Linda Evans, helping an elderly woman like a good son, and telling a bothersome wisecracking kid to buzz off. Match that with clothing and music from 1975 and you've got prime fodder for the biting remarks of Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo--which, of course, they take advantage of handily and in abundance. Mitchell has a few quiet areas but these are spotty, and when Joel and his mechanical friends start wisecracking, it's all hilariously worth the wait. Mitchell: So '70s, you'd swear Kris Kristofferson was moaning the theme song in the background. --Karen Karleski