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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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