From the author of Tokyo Junkie, "the definitive book on Japanese baseball and one of the best-written sports books ever" ( San Francisco Chronicle).One might expect the sport of baseball in Japan to be a culture clash—a collision of American individualism with the Japanese focus on wa, or harmony. Instead, it has turned into a winning symbiosis. Imported American sluggers—some past their primes—have found new life in the East and have gi...

Beautiful and conceited Alicia Matcham leads us through an intriguing web of deceit in search of a killer who is, bizarrely, welcomed by her family. This exciting, gripping crime novel is full of suspense and delivers a thrilling final twist.Saturday 10 June 1933, and one of Charles’s Whitten’s bridge players collapses at the table, apparently from natural causes. Charles’s youngest daughter Patty is convinced it’s murder and pleads with her sister Alicia a party girl with connections to h...

"Bob Whiting came to the city as a stranger in a strange land in 1962 and stayed for five decades—he knows the dark alleys, the good whisky bars, the crooked politicians and the crooks, the baseball players, the bookies…better than anyone alive." —Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo ViceCritically acclaimed author and longtime Japan resident Robert Whiting turns his attention to the fascinating stories of foreigners who made waves and achieved notoriety in pos...

60 years of observation: an American journalist’s memoir about Tokyo’s modern urban transformation, its criminal underworld and, oh yes, baseball.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, T...

This is the story of how a young high school student, through a quirk of fate, begins walking down a path that leads him to become a rural family doctor in Montana.Having served a close-knit community for fifty years Dr. Robert Whiting recounts a story of a diphtheria outbreak, some interesting cancer outcomes, and several cases requiring difficult decision making.In this personal account, youll learn what the medical textbooks cant teach you: How changes in medicine have d...

A riveting account of the role of Americans in the evolution of the Tokyo underworld in the years since 1945.In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945, and w...

In 1945, as part of the Occupation forces sent to postwar Japan Nick Zappetti, a native of Italian East Harlem, entered a world as strange as any he had ever know, In postwar Tokyo, however, he realised there were certain opportunities.He had a failed stint as a professional wrestler, and participated in a fumbled (but famous) diamond heist. He was deported but managed to return with the assistance of the Mafia. Then Nick opened a pizza joint in what would be the centre of Tokyo's ...

In the sixteenth century, the people of England witnessed the physical transformation of their most valued buildings: their parish churches. This is the first ever full-scale investigation of the dramatic changes experienced by the English parish church during the English Reformation. By drawing on a wealth of documentary evidence, including court records, wills and church wardens' accounts, and by examining the material remains themselves - such as screens, fonts, paintings, monuments, wi...

Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic sixty-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, int...

A riveting account of the role of Americans in the evolution of the Tokyo underworld in the years since 1945.In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945, and w...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession.**The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the...

Stories of baffling symptoms and elusive diagnoses from the front lines of medicine that are “like a real-life episode of House” (Publishers Weekly).“Vital Signs,” a popular column featured in Discover magazine, has long been a favorite of readers, showcasing fascinating new tales of strange illnesses and diseases that baffle doctors and elude diagnosis. Each tale is true and borders on the unbelievable. It’s no wonder that throughout the...