“You need two things to make a fine, fine book: a story and a teller. The Opposite Field brings them together, like young love. It’s a story about fathers and sons, and good love and failed love, and baseball. If that isn’t by God a book I don’t know what is. This story breaks your heart in places. But then it makes you glad you have one. In one chapter, after a bitter loss on the baseball field, Coach Jesse Katz throws open the lid on a cooler full of water balloons and a field of misery becomes a place of delight. If there’s a metaphor here, for marriage and fatherhood and all of the rest, that may be it. But the best thing about this book is the teller. This guy can flat-out write.”
—Rick Bragg, author the New York Times bestseller All Over but the Shoutin’
“The Opposite Field is more than a beautifully-written memoir. It’s more than a wonderful baseball story. It indisputably has the element of connectivity that is in all great and powerful storytelling. Jesse Katz delivers the human experience in a way that speaks to all of us.”
—Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Scarecrow and Blood Work
“Cast through the prism of one of America’s oldest pastimes, Jesse Katz illuminates contemporary American life with wonderful detail and honesty. The Opposite Field brings to life the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, drawing them out of the shadows of Hollywood glitz and gangland portraits we typically read about, evoking the struggles and dreams of the children and parents in and around the hidden-away baseball field of La Loma. It’s a heartfelt story, well-told.”
—Norman Ollestad, author of Crazy for the Storm
“A love letter from a father to his son, The Opposite Field is also a hymn to baseball, the new Los Angeles, the joy and pain of modern parenting as well as one man’s journey into wisdom and clarity, and Jesse Katz shapes this material in such a way that he makes it as dramatic as a movie. I never would have thought a book about a Little League team could be this compelling, or that so much could be at stake, or that La Loma could become–and it does in Katz’s buoyant prose–the stuff of legend.”
—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park
“Acutely observed, deeply human, and very wise about the game, The Opposite Field is more than Jesse Katz’s memoir of small town baseball. There’s his wayward love for L.A., Latinas, and the promises of spring. And his realization that every ball diamond is the beginning of an American ballad.”
—D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
“Jesse Katz has captured the hybrid soul of California’s Monterey Park, a community that, despite its sharing a border with the largest Mexican community in America, East L.A., is probably as suburban and middle class as any, particularly in the drama of its neighborhood sports leagues. Yet it is unique in ways that Katz deeply understands and eloquently evokes. And the poetry of his prose–Katz may be the next big writer dude of the LA style.”
—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running
“A ‘Little League Dad’ book like no other. Jesse Katz¹s The Opposite Field is set not in the usual Waspy suburb but in a community on the edge of Los Angeles with a majority Asian and Hispanic population. In addition to evoking surprising cross-cultural discoveries and conflicts, Katz portrays everything from his legendary mother¹s flight from the Nazis to the shooting of his stepson — and critiques not only his failings as a baseball manager but as a parent.”
—Greg Mitchell, author of Joy in Mudville
“With his precise journalistic eye, [Jesse] Katz ultimately chronicles his lifelong quest to finally reach home plate. And it’s a grand slam.”
–from OregonLive.com
“The Opposite Field blends Katz’s both painful and comic struggles as a single dad to remain connected with his growing son through baseball. And with taut and vivid writing befitting a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Katz delivers trenchant observations about relationships, parenthood and his immersion in Latino culture in his love life, at work as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and at play in Max’s Little League.”
–from WWeek.com
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