The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime - Hardcover

Dunow, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767907337 ISBN 13: 9780767907330

Publisher: Broadway, 2001

Synopsis

When Henry Dunow signs up to coach his son Max's Little League team on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he finds himself thinking of his own childhood and about his father, Moishe, and what had been missing from their relationship. Moishe, a Yiddish writer who had recently fled Hitler's Europe, was not a typical postwar dad. Though a tender and loving father, he considered recreation like playing catch with his son narishkeit, "foolishness." Such rites of an all-American boyhood as Little League and the world of sports were utterly foreign in Henry’s cloistered family.

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. His Galaxies are a varied lot-from one dreamy little boy who never stops talking to himself in the outfield, and another who has recently suffered a tragic loss and is angry at the world, to one who needs to be pointed in the direction of first base every time he's lucky enough to hit the ball.

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. With the warmth and humor of a natural storyteller, Dunow recounts the antics of the Galaxies and shares keen observations about parenthood, Jewishness, urban life, and the culture of competition among men and boys. Along the way, he explores the difficult separation from his father and the choices he made in life that Moishe did not understand. He finds that what most renews the feeling of connection with his father-even long after he is gone-is the experience of becoming a father himself.

The Way Home is a touching story of a man trying to understand what it means to be a father even as he is still coming to terms with what it meant to be a son. It will speak to anyone striving to savor what is most precious and fleeting in family life.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Dunow is a literary agent who lives in New York with his wife, Wendy, and their twins, Max and Madeleine.

Reviews

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. (June)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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Dunow might wince at his book's being called adorable, but it is--one of those hybrid tales of his being son to his father and father to his son that can threaten to dissolve into bathos and regret. Not so here. He chronicles his year of coaching his seven-year-old son Max's Little League team on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, at the same time, reminisces about his own father, the Yiddish writer Moishe Dluznowsky. Dunow is funny and tender and gentle even with himself, and he evokes the ratchety sweetness of little boys brilliantly, both his own Max and the little boy--yingeleh--that he was himself. And his evocation of the games of the "Yankee Kittens," invented by Max, where Bernie and Tino play ball with Tottoro in Max's imagination, well, it's utterly beguiling. Dunow deals with the questions raised by coaching: Do you teach baseball, or teamwork, or do you just try to have a good time? And bigger ones: What does it mean to be a man? Or a Dad? Honestly and warmly written. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0767907337
• ISBN 13: 9780767907330
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272