An Omission To Correct

It is indeed a thrill to have a publication review in a national magazine, newspaper or website.  I was fortunate enough to have The Monster Movie Fan's Guide To Japan be reviewed in The Japan Times last Sunday.

In the review article, there was this paragraph (highlights mine):

English-language literature on Godzilla and all the other monsters that followed is rather scarce, probably due to film company Toho's legal actions that in the past have successfully blocked the publication of a number of books. Among the titles worth mentioning, there are Stuart Galbraith IV's "Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo" (1998), Steve Ryfle's "Japan's Favorite Mon-star" (1998), and Peter H. Brothers' "Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda" (2009). Now Godzilla lover and writer Armand Vaquer has come up with a guidebook for all those fans who want to turn a trip to Japan into a pilgrimage to the places that were cinematically trashed by the Big G, Mothra, Gamera and their friends.

To have the travel guide in the company of the aforementioned authors and titles is, indeed, quite an honor.   I personally know each one, and even though some of them and I may have had a disagreement or two over the years, I would feel quite comfortable to sit down with any of them for a friendly chat over beer, wine and cigars.

There was a glaring omission in the paragraph, one that I had nothing to do with.  However, I would like to make mention of it as the author and publication rightly deserves to be mentioned.  That would be the book, Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters and its author, August Ragone.  Ragone's book (I think it is now out-of-print, but copies can still be found here and there) on Japan's special effects pioneer is one of the best English-language books on Japanese science-fiction and fantasy movies to be published.

All of these books are important sources of information for fans or movie historians.  Not including any or all of them in one's personal library of cinema books would make that library an incomplete library, in my view.