Showing results by narrator "Jack Estes" in All Categories

Jack Olsen’s blunt depiction of the shameful treatment of black athletes in the 1960’s. A view of the sport most Americans refused to see during a time of complacency and pervasive racial crisis in America. Black collegiate athletes were often dehumanized, exploited and discarded. Recruited for their skill then lionized on the field and ostracized on campus. The world of professional sports offered black athlete’s opportunity but not equality. Positions that carry authority and responsibility were typically labeled “white only”.

The Pitcher's Kid is Jack Olsen's memoir of the first 18 years of his life, years that formed his voice, his ear, and his passionate concern for the underdog. It is a story of a young boy's desperate yearning for a father during a time of extreme poverty and confusion. The book has been compared to Frank McCourt for its poignant depiction of deprivation, to Geoffrey Wolff for its sad depiction of a deceptive father, and to David Sedaris for its hilarious depiction of childhood.

Isaac, based on a true story, follows the journey of a Polish teen-aged boy from near-death to ultimate triumph. In parable-like prose, it captures Isaac's miraculous survival of the Nazi massacre of his family and fellow Poles and his escape into a vast, nightmarish European forest. After being saved by a gentile from near his village, Isaac joins a group of Russian partisans and becomes a demolition expert. He falls in love with a Russian partisan nurse while striving—even among the partisans—to hide his Jewish background.

Part diary, part scientific journal, part detective story, part love story: The Case of Emily V is thoroughly post-modern in its deliberate blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, its cavalier blending of literary genres. But Oatley's first novel also resembles old 19th-century literature. His characters are dynamic, his storylines complex and suspenseful, his social commentary broad and integral to the plot.

This book involves a young man's coming of age during the 1960s, with the protests of the war in Vietnam always on his mind. It is a family in crisis with the young man trying to solve the family problems while still focusing on peace demonstrations.

A young Floridian tells his story of working at a dress-making company to earn money for college. His colleagues, almost all Cuban, teach him about work and life as they "prepare him" for his big move to New York City.

This is a novel about a single-A baseball team in California, called The Dog Sox. It is owned by a woman who received it as a birthday gift from her boyfriend. The team has a phenomenal pitcher, with a very strange delivery, and a drunken and abusive father. This is a love story about the sport of baseball, a story which is replayed every summer, in every state. The characters come alive in this lively and often humorous novel.

Based on Siegfried Kra's own childhood, Twilight in Danzig reveals life as a Jew during the beginning of Hitler's reign. Jonas Kruger's parents are scions of Danzig society, his father a coal merchant, his mother a lovely socialite. But the rise of Hitler forces them to examine their identity and face the most difficult decision of their lives: to stay in Germany in spite of Hitler's atrocities, to try to reform from within? Or to find a means of escape for the entire family, to flee penniless to a country that doesn't want them?

In this novella by Gil Girion, a married couple living in Los Angeles is suddenly faced with a confusion within their relationship when the wife slips away in the middle of the night without an explanation, taking the dog with her. Her husband is confronted with questions as to where she is going and why she left.

Mace Caslon is a successful New York attorney and a serious collector of art. So why does he decide to walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spray acid over a $41 million painting by Picasso, in broad daylight, and in front of shocked museum-goers? And how does that act affect the lives of thousands of people, especially those close to him?

Sugar Mountain is a cautionary tale about an all-too-possible catastrophe: a deadly flu epidemic that starts in China and spreads throughout the world, slowly at first, then unbelievably fast. And there is no cure. People who prepare for such possibilities are variously referred to as “homesteaders”, “preppers”, or “survivalists”.

This novel is a virtual time machine that takes the reader back to 11th century England - the time of Saxon domination before and after the disastrous Battle of Hastings in 1066. Step directly into the footsteps of Cuthwin of Alnwick. There are few “great men or women” in this historical novel, but instead the story of an ordinary man and his wife who work to survive.

Martin Weinstock is a Harvard Lecturer in Poetry who has lost his way. He doesn't feel that he belongs on the esteemed Faculty ("the best in the world"). He sees his position to be a type of death sentence. Meanwhile, is love life is dying and his parents are dying. He feels as though he's surrounded by death wherever he turns. This is his story. (Winner of Hadassah Magazine's 1994 Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Best Work of Jewish Fiction.)