A surprisingly complex, well-crafted story—much deeper than the average baseball memoir.
A journalist turned Little League commissioner reflects on the role of his son’s team in their lives and their community.
Los Angeles Magazine senior writer Katz was never interested in the glitz or glamour of Los Angeles. A transplant from Oregon, he started as a gang reporter, immersed himself in rough immigrant neighborhoods and, most transformingly, married the local barmaid, an illegal Nicaraguan immigrant with a son she hadn’t seen in years. Though the marriage didn’t last, it produced Max, around whom Katz’s world revolves. From the time Max could walk, the author took him to La Loma, the local park in colorful Monterey Park, and Little League became a major part of their lives. The league—mostly Mexican kids in an Asian-dominated neighborhood—was riddled with problems, from a lack of equipment to delinquent parents, but it was everything to Katz and his son. So important, in fact, that when the league started to unravel, Katz stepped in, putting his career on hold to serve as the commissioner. The Little League years weren’t easy. Katz watched his immigrant stepson struggle, his marriage dissolve and his mother, a prominent Oregon politician, succumb to cancer. But the author also built deep roots in the community and allowed himself to fall in love again, all while trying to create a safe, nurturing environment for Max. Katz’s writing is warm but admirably unsentimental. Even at the most clichéd moments—like when Max, a burgeoning teenager, eschewed Little League for skateboarding and girls—Katz takes it in stride. The bond between the author and his son is touching, but the real story is the community as a whole, and how, as an outsider, Katz came to have such a very natural role in it.
A surprisingly complex, well-crafted story—much deeper than the average baseball memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-40711-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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