Like most great tennis players of the million-dollar era, the career of Jimmy Connors began prenatally. As with Andy Murray, his Grand Slam gene was passed down the maternal line. THE OUTSIDER: My Autobiography, by Jimmy Connors. Bantam, 2013, 400 pp., $28.99 (hardcover) Connors’ ...

In this fourth volume of collected letters, the limitations of the project show up clearly. T.S. Eliot's correspondence documents his life but rarely expresses it.

Lucky great-grandfather Julius. This first member of the Helm family to settle in Japan was “as rooted in his German identity as an old oak tree.” For his mixed-race descendants, life would not be so simple. YOKOHAMA YANKEE: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders ...

It seems like there is no time like the present for Japanese to reflect on the wartime past. Japan’s shared history with Asia has long been a running sore, dividing Japanese about what happened and why, a discourse that clouds the issue of war ...

"Why study anime?" the author of this study of anime asks himself. Good question, thinks the reader. Why indeed "study" a pop art whose appeal is less to thought than to mass, unreflecting, spontaneous enjoyment?

Food got bigger than DIY about a decade back, but publishing took a while to hoist its tired old frame on to the bandwagon. Now the food books tumble out, unstoppable, in a startling range of sub-genres. There’s the cookbook with jokes. The memoir ...

There is a bland, almost corporate flavor to the title of Khaled Hosseini’s third book, suggesting a large but windy Afghan epic. Its narrative wares are clearly advertised in the book-jacket blurb to reassure his tens of millions of worldwide readers that they will ...

In considering the collected poems of Nanao Sakaki, one has to deal with a problem: his life. That life, by all accounts a marvelous adventure, threatens even now, more than four years after the adventure’s end, to overshadow his work. HOW TO LIVE ON ...

It may seem perverse to express nostalgia for a category of mental illness, but many sufferers, as well as some psychiatrists, regret the passing of “manic depression.”

I used to think that Dan Brown was merely bad. Now, after reading the latest version of the apocalyptic thriller he rewrites every few years, I suspect he might be mad as well.

The Edo Period in Japan seems pretty much a feminist’s nightmare. Samurai rule and strict societal boundaries confined women within the neo-Confucianistic bonds of a deeply patriarchal society.

The subject of this slim volume is “a series of events that are essential in understanding Japanese history” — events “totally unknown, incredible, and unpleasant to read.”