Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I was very disappointed by this book. Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg was one of the best histories I have ever read. This was not even good."Samurai William" - William Adams - is almost an afterthought in the book. Rather the book is page after page of anecdotal information about members of Britain's East India Company in Japan. There is far more information about their parties, girlfriends, gifts given and received and the like than anyone needs or would find interesting. More troubling, is that Mr. Milton was so bogged down in the minutae, that no broad picture was ever painted. The anecdotal history had no context. Therefore it was merely tedious. Had there been a thesis or broad stroke backdrop, the anecdotes might have fleshed out the narrative. Instead the history was notably thin and left me with very little to take away. The title character is most often a tangential figure. He is always called upon to bail out the other Englishmen because of his closeness to Japan's rulers. Mr. Milton never quite explains (or even theorizes) why he was so revered by the Japanese. Surprisingly, at the end of the book, he notes that an area was named for Adams and he was still revered 200 years later. No explanation was given why. I strongly recommend that you skip this and go to Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. I got the strong feeling that the author had researched thousands of pages of East India Company documents and figured he ought to get another book out of the effort. It needed much more Japanese history and culture explanations to make it worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I was very disappointed by this book. Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg was one of the best histories I have ever read. This was not even good. "Samurai William" - William Adams - is almost an afterthought in the book. Rather the book is page after page of anecdotal information about members of Britain's East India Company in Japan. There is far more information about their parties, girlfriends, gifts given and received and the like than anyone needs or would find interesting. More troubling, is that Mr. Milton was so bogged down in the minutae, that no broad picture was ever painted. The anecdotal history had no context. Therefore it was merely tedious. Had there been a thesis or broad stroke backdrop, the anecdotes might have fleshed out the narrative. Instead the history was notably thin and left me with very little to take away. The title character is most often a tangential figure. He is always called upon to bail out the other Englishmen because of his closeness to Japan's rulers. Mr. Milton never quite explains (or even theorizes) why he was so revered by the Japanese. Surprisingly, at the end of the book, he notes that an area was named for Adams and he was still revered 200 years later. No explanation was given why. I strongly recommend that you skip this and go to Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. I got the strong feeling that the author had researched thousands of pages of East India Company documents and figured he ought to get another book out of the effort. It needed much more Japanese history and culture explanations to make it worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I was very disappointed by this book. Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg was one of the best histories I have ever read. This was not even good. "Samurai William" - William Adams - is almost an afterthought in the book. Rather the book is page after page of anecdotal information about members of Britain's East India Company in Japan. There is far more information about their parties, girlfriends, gifts given and received and the like than anyone needs or would find interesting. More troubling, is that Mr. Milton was so bogged down in the minutae, that no broad picture was ever painted. The anecdotal history had no context. Therefore it was merely tedious. Had there been a thesis or broad stroke backdrop, the anecdotes might have fleshed out the narrative. Instead the history was notably thin and left me with very little to take away. The title character is most often a tangential figure. He is always called upon to bail out the other Englishmen because of his closeness to Japan's rulers. Mr. Milton never quite explains (or even theorizes) why he was so revered by the Japanese. Surprisingly, at the end of the book, he notes that an area was named for Adams and he was still revered 200 years later. No explanation was given why. I strongly recommend that you skip this and go to Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. I got the strong feeling that the author had researched thousands of pages of East India Company documents and figured he ought to get another book out of the effort. It needed much more Japanese history and culture explanations to make it worthwhile.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks Japanese sources
Review: I wish that the author had included Japanese sources. I would be interested in reading about the role of the Portuguese in Hormozd, Persia and how they were expelled with the aid of the English fleet. Also, Persia, after the enlightened reign of Shah Abbas I, went into a period of xenophobia.
The merchant history of the East India Co. with respect to the Dutch East India Co. was what I found most informative.
Rating:
Summary: Good writing, questionable history
Review: Like most reviewers before me, I was quite enthralled with the story of William Adams, the foremost Englishman in early Tokugawa Japan period. I supposed the recent released of Shogun on DVD have inspired me to read this book since the main character of that show was based on the titled character. The book was well written but like one reviewer before me stated, it relied totally on European sources which have a tendencies to be very inaccurate or even bias. How can one write anything on Japan at all without Japanese sources. A good example of this was when the author described Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu as "sadistic" for the way he dealt with the Christians. Considering that he was considered as quite an enlightened ruler by many historians, the author totally failed to point out that Iemitsu's actions against the Christians took on a devastating scale only after the Japanese Christians and their padres mounted a full scale revolt at Shimabara Castle in 1637. While considered as a "peasant revolt", primary fighting forces were Christians. This revolt shocked the Tokugawa bakufu to the core which led to drastic reaction. Such oversight like this cheapen the accuracy of the well written words. (What ruler in Europe would not have done the same if a large group of Buddhists joined a large scale revolt against crown and realm??) While the book was supposed to be on William Adams, it basically centered around the English effort to promote trade with Japan. Ironically, it might be hard to regard this as Adams' biography at all. He seem to be a background character a lot of time. What really hurt this book was that the author appears to be totally unfamiliar with Japanese history and totally lacks Japanese sources. Would a book on English history be any worth if there was no English sources?? Two stars for good writing and entertaining reading material though, can't fault the man's skill with the English language! PS: In that revolt mentioned above, Dutch provided a warship that help pummeled that revolt to the ground. It was probably one of the major reasons why the Dutch kept their trade base opened while all other European powers did not.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Milton presents an easy-to-read account of early European ventures in Japan. The key figure which holds this book together is William Adams (of Shogun fame). Adams is an English pilot who finds himself in Japan after a particularly perilous journey. Being a stranger in a strange land, he faces many difficulties, but through luck and skill in adaptation, he becomes someone of importance in his new home country. Years later, a group of Englishmen from the East India Company come to set up a factory (trading post). Even though the title of this book is Samurai William, it would be more accurate to describe this book as a history of the East India Company trading post in Japan. Throughout most of this book, Adams appears only as a supporting character. This book is useful for it's descriptions of Japan in the early 1600's. It's interesting to read about the reations the English and the Japanese had to each other. For example, the English reacted to the violence and strict justice in Japanese society, and the Japanese reacted to the uncleanliness of the English. It's definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Turning Japanese
Review: Milton's "Samurai William" is a brilliantly researched story about William Adams, a smart young fellow from England with very little pedigree but a facility for Oriental languages and a deft negotiating style. Upon reaching Japan he survived the customary welcome for foreigners (viz. public beheading) and then parlayed his way into a trade monopoly, cleverly outsting (or sometimes merely outlasting) the Dutch and Portuguese traders. Adams had one solid advantage over his fellow Westerners: humility (or at least an ability to fake it). (If there's one thing that this story teaches you, it's the occasional importance of remaining silent while the blowhards self-destruct.) Milton is also unsparing about the macarbre execution rituals of seventeenth-century Japanese society.
Rating:
Summary: Turning Japanese
Review: Milton's "Samurai William" is a brilliantly researched story about William Adams, a smart young fellow from England with very little pedigree but a facility for Oriental languages and a deft negotiating style. Upon reaching Japan he survived the customary welcome for foreigners (viz. public beheading) and then parlayed his way into a trade monopoly, cleverly outsting (or sometimes merely outlasting) the Dutch and Portuguese traders. Adams had one solid advantage over his fellow Westerners: humility (or at least an ability to fake it). (If there's one thing that this story teaches you, it's the occasional importance of remaining silent while the blowhards self-destruct.) Milton is also unsparing about the macarbre execution rituals of seventeenth-century Japanese society.
Rating:
Summary: A Period Piece
Review: Personally, I think this book suffers a bit of a personality disorder. The title is deceptive with Samurai William himself occasionally sidelined for what are probably more interesting developments that occured in Japan and the Orient at the time.
I think Milton realised that, had he simply concentrated on his main subject, he wouldn't have much of a read. This is because the sources of info on Samurai William are fairly sparse. In order to develop the book into something readable a lot of other detail is included.
Not to say that this isn't interesting. It is. We get to hear about various Europeans experiencing an extremely interesting period of Japanese history and get a pretty clear picture of the time.
So, if you are a serious student of history focussed on William himself, this book is likely to disappoint. If however, as I am, you are a lover of Japanese history, you will benefit from a read of this.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining ... but I wish we had the Japanese perspective
Review: Samurai William is a very interesting tale about William Adams, an Englishman who had a small, but important, impact on Japanese history. For readers familiar with James Clavell's "Shogun", William Adams is the man that "Anjin-san" is based on. The main problem I had with this book is Milton's nearly complete absence of Japanese sources. Adams' appearance and involvement in Japanese politics must have provoked rather significant reactions from the leading Japanese leaders of the time, but Milton sadly does not deal with this story from the Japanese side at all. Additionally, in the British edition of this book at least, there are several mistakes regarding the Japanese culture and the language. Most humorously, he refers to "bannermen" as "hamamoto" when he means "hatamoto." A "hamamoto" might best be called a "beachman," which I assume Milton did not intend. Hopefully this type of mistake was caught before the American version was printed. I would imagine many of these mistakes are due to Milton's over-reliance on old European sources and unfamiliarity with the Japanese culture. Milton is clearly a writer first and a historian second. As such, the line between fact and fiction is somewhat vague at times. Nevertheless, this is a very interesting book. Just remember that it is not always an entirely accurate one.
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