Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world. Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation. A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.

Combining the content of two of Frommer's previous books, Sports Roots and Sports Lingo, this book not only explains how nicknames, namesakes, trophies, competitions, and expressions in the world of sports came to be, but also serves as a useful dictionary of the language of sports-both technical and slang.

It started 50 years ago with a few TV baseball games. Now, every man who's not out in the woods finding his inner wild man is plunked down in front of a 27-inch diagonal screen watching football, basketball, hockey, darts, the Olympics--anything that even faintly resembles a "sport". This hilarious, biting, incisive book takes a look at the hugely popular phenomenon of television sports.

Propounding his "small ball theory" of sports literature, George Plimpton proposed that "the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature." Of course he had the relatively small baseball in mind, because its literature is formidable--vast and varied, instructive, often wildly entertaining, and occasionally brilliant. From this bewildering array of baseball books, Ron Kaplan has chosen 501 of the best, making it easier for fans to find just the books to suit them (or to know what they're missing). From biography, history, fiction, and instruction to books about ballparks, business, and rules, anyone who loves to read about baseball will find in this book a companionable guide, far more fun than a reference work has any right to be.

Focusing on such athletes as Art Pennington, Bruno Haas, and Bill Lange, Salin presents the stories of more than a dozen former players, many in his own words. 15 photos.