context: painting > sources

The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi by William Scott Wilson

We have some of the best material the world has to offer, as Wilson writes the first Western biography in over a century of arguably Japan's greatest samurai warrior, and a wonderful artist as well. Sadly, Wilson doesn't really know whether he is writing a rattling good yarn based on true stories, or surveying the source documentation to give us what facts are known - and ends up doing neither, or both at once, or the wrong one at the wrong time. He wastes every story, every point, wanders off to demonstrate his broader knowledge and research at inopportune moments and writes dismally. He's a translator generally, so I was surprised at repeated linguistic sloppiness well represented by "still extant" - extant means 'still in existence'.

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