With talented young Japanese players signing to the American Majors, interest in Japanese baseball is at an all-time high. Sayonara Home Run! introduces curious fans to Japan's national pastime through the lens of the country's playfully beautiful baseball cards. A fascinating text traces the roots and cross-cultural history of the Japanese game, while hundreds of illustrations showcase gorgeous vintage cards. Woven throughout are profiles of key Japanese players, features on important U.S. team tours of Japan (with Japanese cards of players such as Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio), and insights into the social history of the cards. Including primers on Japanese player nicknames and baseball terms, and the fine points of the Japanese game, Sayonara Home Run! is a must-have for anyone interested in baseball, Japan, or this unique chapter in popular design.

The definitive work on the language of baseball—one of the “Five Best Baseball Books” (Wall Street Journal). Hailed as “a staggering piece of scholarship” (Wall Street Journal) and “an indispensable guide to the language of baseball” (San Diego Union-Tribune), The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has become an invaluable resource for those who love the game. Drawing on dozens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as contemporary sources, Dickson’s brilliant, illuminating definitions trace the earliest appearances of terms both well known and obscure. This edition includes more than 10,000 terms with 18,000 individual entries, and more than 250 photos. This “impressively comprehensive” (The Nation) book will delight everyone from the youngest fan to the hard-core aficionado.

Throw a frozen rope! Hit a dinger! Catch a stinger! Discover the meaning of these big-league terms and more in Baseball Talk. Created with Sports Illustrated Kids, this nonfiction book presents wacky lingo and puzzling phrases from America's favorite pastime. Explore the origin of these words and phrases--from homers to beanballs--and discover how collegiate and big-league players use them on the baseball diamond. With action-packed photos and rapid-fire text, baseball fans will be cheering for more!

The volumes in this series set out to provide a contemporary record of the spread and development of the English language in South, Southeast, and East Asia from both a linguistic and literary perspective. Each volume will reflect themes that cut across national boundaries, including the study of language policies; globalization and linguistic imperialism; English in the media; English in law, government and education; 'hybrid' Englishes; and the bilingual creativity manifested by the vibrant creative writing found in a swathe of Asian societies. This book gives an in-depth analysis of the use of the English language in modern Japan. It explores the many ramifications the Japanese-English language and culture contact situation has for not only Japanese themselves, but also others in the international community. Data for this book has been gathered using anthropological ethnographic fieldwork, augmented by archival sources, written materials, and items from popular culture and the mass media. An interdisciplinary approach, including those of anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive science and symbolic anthropology, is taken in the exploration of the topics here. This book's arguments focus on four major theoretical linguistic and social issues, namely the place of the Japanese-English case in the larger context of 'World Englishes'; the place of the Japanese-English case in a general theory of language and culture contact; how Japanese English informs problems of categorization, meaning construction and cognition; and what it says about the social construction of identity and sense of self, nationalism and race. This book will be of interest to linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, and all readers who are interested in language contact, sociolinguistics, English as an international language, and World Englishes. It will also appeal to those who are interested in Japan and popular culture.

Baseball was introduced to Japan shortly after it took hold in the U.S. & it has been a point of intense national pride. Its history has many great stars & shares intriguing moments with the American game, incl.: Eiji Sawamura, who struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, & Jimmy Foxx in succession during an internat. all-star game; & Sadaharu Oh, who hit 100 more home runs than Hank Aaron. Showcases the colorful baseball cards produced in Japan from the early 1900s through the 1960s, using the cards to discuss great players & moments in Japanese baseball history, & the special role of foreign players on Japanese teams. Includes primers on the differences in the Japanese game, key player biographies, & a lexicon of Japanese baseball terms. Illus.

From a great master of historical fiction comes a brilliant tale of love amid war. James A. Michener combines powerful storytelling with deep sensitivity in this novel of a U.S. Army man who, against all odds, falls for a fascinating Japanese woman. Stationed in the exotic Far East, Major Lloyd Gruver considers himself lucky. The son of a general, dating the daughter of another powerful military family, he can look forward to a bright future. And he just can’t understand guys like Private Joe Kelly, who throw away their lives in the States by marrying local girls. But then Lloyd meets Hana-ogi. After that, nothing matters anymore . . . nothing but her. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for James A. Michener “A master storyteller . . . Michener, by any standards, is a phenomenon.”—The Wall Street Journal “Sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.”—The New York Times “Michener has become an institution in America, ranking somewhere between Disneyland and the Library of Congress. You learn a lot from him.”—Chicago Tribune “While he fascinates and engrosses, Michener also educates.”—Los Angeles Times

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year “An instant sports classic.” —New York Post * “Stellar.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A true masterwork…880 pages of sheer baseball bliss.” —BookPage (starred review) * “This is a remarkable achievement.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A magnum opus from acclaimed baseball writer Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100 is an audacious, singular, and masterly book that took a lifetime to write. The entire story of baseball rings through a countdown of the 100 greatest players in history, with a foreword by George Will. Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,? The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than two hundred years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?” Baseball’s legends come alive in these pages, which are not merely rankings but vibrant profiles of the game’s all-time greats. Posnanski dives into the biographies of iconic Hall of Famers, unfairly forgotten All-Stars, talents of today, and more. He doesn’t rely just on records and statistics—he lovingly retraces players’ origins, illuminates their characters, and places their accomplishments in the context of baseball’s past and present. Just how good a pitcher is Clayton Kershaw in the 21st-century game compared to Greg Maddux dueling with the juiced hitters of the nineties? How do the career and influence of Hank Aaron compare to Babe Ruth’s? Which player in the top ten most deserves to be resurrected from history? No compendium of baseball’s legendary geniuses could be complete without the players of the segregated Negro Leagues, men whose extraordinary careers were largely overlooked by sportswriters at the time and unjustly lost to history. Posnanski writes about the efforts of former Negro Leaguers to restore sidelined Black athletes to their due honor and draws upon the deep troves of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and extensive interviews with the likes of Buck O’Neil to illuminate the accomplishments of players such as pitchers Satchel Paige and Smokey Joe Williams; outfielders Oscar Charleston, Monte Irvin, and Cool Papa Bell; first baseman Buck Leonard; shortstop Pop Lloyd; catcher Josh Gibson; and many, many more. The Baseball 100 treats readers to the whole rich pageant of baseball history in a single volume. Engrossing, surprising, and heartfelt, it is a magisterial tribute to the game of baseball and the stars who have played it.

Danger and action abound after Akira Sengoku and his classmates crash-land on a deserted island while flying home from a class trip. The island doesn't exist on any maps but that's not even the strangest part: the animals they find on the island are prehistoric beasts that are supposed to have been extinct for thousands of years! Now Akira and his friends are in danger as the island's residents start eyeing the humans for their next meal. Will they ever solve the mystery of the island and find their way home?

In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. Thomas F. Carter contends that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. The Quality of Home Runs is Carter’s lively ethnographic exploration of the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, Carter points out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home. As an avid baseball fan, Carter draws on his experiences listening to and participating in discussions of baseball in Cuba (particularly in Havana) and among Cubans living abroad to describe how baseball provides the ground for negotiations of national, masculine, and class identities wherever Cubans gather. He considers the elaborate spectacle of Cuban baseball as well as the relationship between the socialist state and the enormously popular sport. Carter provides a detailed history of baseball in Cuba, analyzing players, policies, rivalries, and fans, and he describes how the sport has forged connections (or reinforced divisions) between Cuba and other nations. Drawing on insights from cultural studies, political theory, and anthropology, he maintains that sport and other forms of play should be taken seriously as crucibles of social and cultural experience.