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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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