OPPOSITE FIELD, THE(ISBN=9780307407122) 英文原版 epub 下载 pdf 网盘 2025 mobi 在线 免费

　　Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly

original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and

finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of

language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and

Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place

and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a

home.

Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League

program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian

suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust

into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its

lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community

are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and

night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of

his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his

home.

While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down

delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to

bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors,

and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less

drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a

stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a

legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and

receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a

good woman.

Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son,

Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine

springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less

than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and,

ultimately, a man.

This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously

evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that

it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts

to the quick of what it means to be alive.

From the Hardcover edition.

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　　JESSE KATZ is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former

staffer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles

magazine. He lives with his son, Max, in Monterey Park,

California.

　　From the Hardcover edition.

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　　PROLOGUE

　　My park is called La Loma. I have always liked the sound of that,

the symmetry of those double-barrel Ls, the femininity of the final

Spanish vowels, the spacey La-La Land echo, all an improvement on

its stiff translation: the Hill. La Loma is prettier, softer and

rounder, earthier–loamier. A park for losing yourself in. The park

I went looking for myself in.

　　Max and I have spent nine springs and summers there, through

squalls and droughts, heat waves and cold snaps, from his preschool

years to the onslaught of adolescence. We have celebrated there and

we have sulked there, twirling like fools across the dirt and

chalk, drowning our broken hearts with fusillades of water

balloons. We have made friends for life at La Loma and, I suspect,

enemies for just as long. We have gone there to forget and to

remember, to stop time and to grow up. The park is under our skin:

season after season of bites, burns, stings, cuts, sprains, scars.

Max has bled at La Loma. He has barfed there. He has wet himself. I

have rinsed his wounds at La Loma, iced him, kneaded him, bandaged

him, scooped him off the ground, his face streaked with sweat and

clay and eye-black grease, and held him in my arms. Max has stood

there, in jersey and cap, and hacked out “The Star-Spangled Banner”

in front of a thousand people on his electric guitar. I have given

myself to those same people, cheered and groaned alongside them,

accepted their prayers and shared their beers, slipped to me in

Styrofoam coffee cups. Whenever we have needed it, whenever I have

felt burdened or alone, La Loma has been there. The park is always

the park. Our refuge. My excuse.

　　It rises from the haze and glare of inland Los Angeles, far from

Hollywood, beyond the margins of the tourist maps. In a city that

skews west, toward the surf, La Loma is on the wrong side, east of

the skyline, east of skid row, east of the rail yards, the

slaughterhouses, the riverbed. By a shade, it is east of East Los

Angeles, the original gangland, the cultural heartland of Mexican

America. La Loma marks the spot roughly at which the barrio ends

and the burbs begin, where inner-city Los Angeles meets

bedroom-community Los Angeles. Knots of prickly pear give way to

tidy rows of jacaranda, with flurries that dust the sidewalk

purple, and Depression-era adobes fade into 1950s subdivisions, of

a style known as California ranch, with gas fireplaces and attached

garages and faux clapboard shutters.

　　La Loma falls within Monterey Park, one of those invisible

municipalities you could spend a lifetime in L.A. and never visit,

maybe even never hear of. The town is blandly provincial and yet

stunningly foreign: forty thousand of its sixty-three thousand

residents are of Asian descent, the highest concentration in any

city in the continental United States. It was this fact that first

drew me here, as a novice journalist, almost twenty-five years ago.

I was new to L.A., new to adulthood, and the battles then raging

between Chinese émigrés and Anglo nativists–over language, over

customs, over the right to belong–were redefining what it means to

be middle class and American. From the polite liberalism of Oregon,

via a fancy college in Vermont, I had been transported to a furious

social laboratory on the haunches of Los Angeles. A new form of

white flight was under way, not from a decaying urban core but from

an ethnically convulsing suburb: Rather than embrace the new

Monterey Park, twenty thousand white folks up and split. At the

time, I could never have foreseen that this curious place would one

day lure me back, not as a writer but as a father, that I would be

returning, against the tide, to make Monterey Park my own. But that

was long ago, before I married a barmaid from Nicaragua, before I

inherited an extended family of aliens and castaways, before we had

Max, our maple-skinned, almond-eyed chameleon of a son, whose

childhood I was determined to mold and preserve.

　　Through eucalyptus, past weeping red bottlebrush, over bark

mulch, La Loma hugs the hill, pausing and ascending and pausing

again–a vertical park, winding to some unseen pinnacle, rather than

the naked grid of a playground. Each level of La Loma is distinct,

concealed by shrubs and connected by stairs, exactly forty of them

from bottom to top. Climbing them all is like scaling a

labyrinthine tree fort, part Dr. Seuss and part Swiss Family

Robinson. La Loma twists and strays, a dense wall of ice plants

here, a secluded meadow there, a nest of hornets, a shock of

wildflowers, a connect-the-dots of gopher holes, another rise and a

thicket and a clearing, the park revealing itself with each turn.

For as long as we have been going to La Loma, Max has been carving

his own path, as all the kids do, finding freedom in the bramble.

He squeezes between the narrowest gaps, scampers up the trickiest

banks, and slides down the steepest chutes on rafts made of twigs

and cardboard. Their name for this caper is Mission Impossible, and

I can almost hear them dun-dun-dern-dern-dun-dun-ing the theme as

they traverse the slopes, imbuing the topography of La Loma with

drama.

　　Up the steps, on the highest levels, La Loma grows flat. The

terraces unfurl into broad fields, like the mesas of a Road Runner

cartoon. It is there, between March and July, that we play

baseball–hundreds of boys and girls, hundreds of games a year.

Because of the grade and the foliage, it is difficult to see from

the street that any of this is happening, difficult to imagine that

the fortunes of an entire Little League could be contained within

the undulations of this one hill. To discover La Loma, to cross its

threshold, to rove its crooks, to emerge, breathless, at its

summit, is to view Los Angeles from the inside out. Downtown is

just seven miles away–the basin sprawls below us, the skies above

sparkle with LAX-bound jets–yet from this perch, it is quite

possible to think of La Loma as its own universe, a secret park,

into which nobody ventures without meaning to be there.

　　At night, when the last games are over and the lights shut off, I

often take a moment on the bleachers, to watch the moon and listen

to the crickets, just me and Max. I have been coaching his teams at

La Loma since he was in T-ball. He was six then, a guileless

kindergartner, with no choice but to trust the decrees of his dad.

Max is fourteen now and more complicated, a rocker and a skater,

with a MySpace page and a life I will never again know everything

about. On these diamonds I have witnessed him fail and triumph and

fail again, his baby fat replaced by sinew and poise. Over the

course of perhaps a thousand innings, he has known every possible

outcome: the game-winning hit, the game-losing pitch, the acrobatic

catch, the booted grounder, the daring steal, the fumbled tag, the

beanballs both dispensed and received. I believe he has loved it as

much as I have. Nine years of jerseys hang in his closet, nine

years of trophies line his bookshelf, nine years of team photos–Max

growing taller and shaggier, me grayer and thicker–stick to our

refrigerator door. But with high school about to start, I can see

just as well that we are at the end of something, that this park

that has framed our relationship for two-thirds of his life is no

longer the place by which he measures himself. He has one more year

left, but he is done with La Loma. He is gifted enough, I think, to

go out for his freshman team, but he is done with baseball. Max, if

I understand him these days, is done with organized sports, with

the uniformity and the corniness and the genuflections to

authority. “I don’t know what happened, Dad,” he tells me. “I’m

just not feelin’ it anymore.” Soon enough, I fear, he will be done

being the boy who feels the need to offer any explanations at

all.

　　Some of these changes are surely inevitable, a child’s natural

course, but I am no less wistful about them. I did everything in my

power to slow the process, to conserve La Loma for Max for as long

as I could. When we started, it was all about the two of us, father

and son tossing the ball, creating our own nostalgia in the grass.

Four years later I was running the park. I had become the

commissioner, Monterey Park’s guardian of baseball. It is a

position I assumed with equal measures of duty and dread, hoping to

salvage a season on the verge of collapse. The league was

imploding. Families were bailing. Nobody claimed to be in charge.

When Max’s team was my only concern, I had been able to tune out

the warning signs, all the blustery dads who treated La Loma as

turf, mining it for money and prestige. I was still Max’s coach,

but now I had volunteered to sweep up their wreckage–to preside

over a community that had never quite invited me in. It was a

decent thing to do. It was also mulish and self-destructive. You

could say that about a lot of my choices.

　　The cliché of Little League, of youth sports in America, is one

of lost perspective: By taking it too seriously, adults have ruined

a children’s game. I have begun to think that the opposite is true,

that we do not take it seriously enough. Nothing in my forty-plus

years has compared with the enormity, with the complexities or the

sensitivities, of trying to keep La Loma afloat. Nothing has done

as much to test my judgment. Nothing has made me feel so

responsible for so much beyond my control. Being commissioner means

being La Loma’s publicist, accountant, emcee, detective,

psychologist, chef, graphic designer, janitor, landscaper,

paramedic, choreographer, and justice of the peace, one whose

standing is based largely on the absence of anyone else willing to

assume the office. No matter how many hours I put into it–and for

someone who putatively holds a “real job,” I have put in more than

I should ever admit–there is always a parent to soothe or to scold,

a protest to weigh, a schedule to juggl...

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　　Amazon Exclusive: Rick Bragg Reviews The Opposite Field

　　Rick Bragg is the author of the bestselling All Over but the

Shoutin', a New York Times notable book of the year, as well as The

Prince of Frogtown and Ava's Man, both memoirs. A Pulitzer

Prize-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, Bragg

is also the author of Somebody Told Me, a critically acclaimed

collection of his newspaper stories. Read his exclusive Amazon

guest review of The Opposite Field:

　　In one shimmering paragraph in the memoir Opposite Field, you

almost begin to believe that award-winning writer Jesse Katz might

be the luckiest man on earth.

　　In it, he stands looking across a little league baseball complex

in Monterey Park, a million gray parking lots from Hollywood, from

the Pacific. But these fields are his oasis. Even the name is

lovely: La Loma. Here, he will coach his own son, his prodigy, year

after year.

　　"It was a natural stadium, geologically perfect... the homerun

fence curling through a wall of green. The effect was at once lush

and windswept.. you could stand here and watch... five-year-olds

lost in clover at this corner, ten-year-olds spitting seeds at the

other, fifteen-year-olds brandishing metal spikes... I would guide

Max through that circuit... in this one extraordinary park, I would

see him grow into a young man."

　　And that is where the perfection ends. Life, love, fatherhood,

and baseball, come flying at him spikes high and gouge him straight

through the heart--and sometimes the groin.

　　He tells it all in a rich story that is in places warm and in

others raw, where a stepson almost dies from a gunshot to his face,

and the special man in a beloved’s life is somebody else. The

baseball is almost an antidote to life here, where, after one

spirit-numbing loss, the coach raises the lid on a cooler filled

with water balloons.

　　And if you love the game you will love it displayed here, a

sweet, sad, poignant and sometimes hysterical drama in the dirt, a

world where coaches plot, scheme and go on meth binges, outfielders

with medical conditions twitch from the sparse grass, and

monogrammed Louisville Sluggers splinter on the first pitch.

　　But it is also an unflinching story written by a great writer

about failed marriage, and not some small amount of hanky panky. It

is a wrenching story of a son who watches a strong mother battle

cancer to a stand-still. And, through it all, it is a story of a

father who watches his son shift and change in delightful and

heart-searing ways, hoping that his decisions do more good than

harm, hoping that at the end of the day his son will know... what?

That his father loves him above all things.

　　This is not a pat story, not a neat one. People are not that

way.

　　It is much better than that.

　　Here, you learn that not getting the girl is not so cruel, that

growing older with disappointment and doubt and fear is not so

bad--as long as your boy hits .620, and throws a curve ball that

drops off the edge of the world.--Rick Bragg

媒体评论

　　“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

　　From the Hardcover edition.

书籍介绍

Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a home.

Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home.

While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a good woman.

Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man.

This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive.

From the Hardcover edition.