NAOMI OSAKA

A comprehensive look at the career of a young tennis star.

Rothenberg, a senior editor for Racquet magazine, has followed Osaka ever since she joined the Women’s Tennis Association Tour in 2014. In this chronicle of the ups and downs of Osaka’s career, the author describes her parents’ marriage, Osaka’s eerie similarities to the Williams sisters, the growth and refinement of her skills as a tennis player, her early tournament successes and failures, her involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, and her pregnancy and (possibly temporary) retirement from tournament play. Born in 1997 in Japan to a mixed-race couple (Japanese mother, Haitian father), Naomi and her sister, Mari, received strict instruction from their father, who followed the example of Richard Williams and improbably succeeded in raising a world-class tennis player (Mari also played professionally but was not as accomplished as Naomi). Osaka won the U.S. Open in 2018, defeating her personal idol, Serena Williams, in a match marred by an officiating controversy, and went on to be ranked number one in the world as both a player and an earner of endorsement income. (She has won three other major tournaments since that first victory.) But as Rothenberg shows, Osaka, like many professional athletes, has struggled with mental health issues, which has caused her to withdraw from tournaments multiple times. The author nicely handles his subject’s bouts of self-doubt and depression, and though Osaka herself was to seek a diagnosis and counseling, the descriptions of her crises are compelling. The prose is workmanlike, and the narrative structure is straightforward. The attention to detail is admirable, though perhaps too much text is devoted to the progress of individual matches. Because Osaka is only 25, a 450-page book seems a bit excessive at this point in her journey.

A solid account of the early stages of an as-yet-unfinished career.