Books put reader at bat, on green

Digitized by Jessica Suchman and Catherine Nissley.

The vendors sell sushi, sake and hotto dogu to crowds of 50,000 in the stadiums of Japan, a nation of besuboru nuts. It is the same American pastime that we watch, writes Whiting, who has watched it there for a decade, but then it's not quite the same. Japanese values – group identity, cooperation, respect for age, and "face" – have permeated baseball, and for Americans what better way to learn about them than by watching them do our thing?