The Way Home
Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
When Henry Dunow signs up to coach his son Max’s Little League team on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he finds himself looking back on his own childhood and his father, Moishe, a Yiddish writer and refugee from Hitler’s Europe, who had considered recreation like playing catch with his son narishkeit, “foolishness.” Determined to be a different kind of parent to his first grader, Dunow bumbles through a self-test of fatherhood on the scruffy fields of New York’s Riverside Park, playing coach, cheerleader, father, and friend to a ragtag bunch of seven-year-olds, many of whom are discovering baseball for the first time. The Way Home is the affecting and ironic story of Dunow’s journey of discovery as he watches his relationship with Max evolve over the course of a Little League season, and comes to understand what being a father to his son can teach him about the man who was his own father.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A few years ago, Dunow, a New York literary agent, noticed that he wasn't connecting as he hoped with his son, Max, then five. Was Dunow repeating the pattern of alienation that marred his relationship with his own adored father? To grow closer to Max, the author decided to coach his son's Little League team. This affecting memoir, Dunow's first book, interweaves an account of a year spent coaching with memories of Dunow's growing up in a family headed by a Polish Jewish immigrant father, a Yiddish writer who was left cold by both sports and those who played it. The Little League passages, detailing Dunow's struggles to cohere his generally untalented team, as well as to cope with another coach with a more aggressive approach, veer between the amusing and the sentimental while expressing convincingly Dunow's love of baseball and his regard for the boys in his charge. More memorable than Dunow's bonding with his son is his reaching out to a troubled boy whose father has died recently. It's as if the extremity of the boy's plight draws out the writing talent in Dunow a phenomenon repeated in the more successful portion of the book, dealing with Dunow's father. Moishe Dluznowsky comes across as a larger-than-life character cantankerous, stubborn, immensely proud and Dunow's prose takes on an intensity and passion when describing him that's occasionally lacking elsewhere. This involving, heartfelt book will appeal especially to fathers. Forecast: An obvious bet for Father's Day sales, this title will be supported by national advertising, including a radio phoner campaign, and should do respectably.
