It's surreal reading a book that FEELS like it could be contemporary enough (boys playing Little League, getting into scraps as kids do, and older siblings/parents being overbearing), but realizing that this book was published in 1969 and that manned space travel didn't exist yet.

Mark (or Moshe, his Hebrew name) mentions that maybe the Russians will make it to the moon before the Americans, a moment that made my soul exit my body.

1969 must've been an exciting time. I happened to watch Fly Me to the Moon a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't realized what a Before and After moment the Moon landing was in history. To me, that was something known, given...it has always existed.

And...AND! Multiple characters in this book were like, "What's a 'bagel'? I've never had a bagel."

Bagels, yet another thing that are 100% a given in my life. They're mainstream and have always existed. Man, 1969 must've been WILD.

This felt like a nice time capsule of an age when life seemed more simple. Definitely hard to relate as a 42-year-old woman in 2024, but I enjoyed being in Mark's head and seeing his world, as well as how he saw/experienced it.

Although it takes place in the late 1960s, this story is ahead of its time. Take a synagogue-sponsored Little League Team; the narrator's outspoken, baseball-loving mother as coach; a pair of gifted twins whose pitching talents literally mirror each other's, and .... Playboy Magazine. Yep, Hugh Hefner's publication figures in there as well, at a time when it cost only 75 cents an issue. Now take THAT salmon and smoke it!

I don't remember a ton about this book. But I remember thinking it was ok, and being shocked to read a book about a Jewish baseball team

The protagonist of this book is Mark Setzer who is a young kid. Mark has a lot of stuff on his mind. He is nervous about his upcoming bar mitzvah, and he doesnt see his best friend anymore. Mark's mother becomes a manager of a little league baseball team, which Mark is on. The team does well and they go onto the championship. Mark has a major secret, but he doesnt want to tell anyone.

I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone, just by looking at the cover of the book i was able to predict what was going to happen.To me i dont really like those types of books.

If i were to rate this book out of ten, i would give it a five. Im being generous in giving it a five rating.

I love Konigsburg -- and this does have her trademark wit and sparkly style -- but I'm sorry to say I still couldn't get in to it. There's something about it -- the hippie college brother, the language -- that feels dated.

This book was a really fun story. I liked the boy Mark in the story and learning about him. The story did not have a lot of surprises, but thats fine. I did feel the story was a little too sporty for me but thats also fine. I did like how much education there is about Judaism in the book and you learn some Hebrew. It also had a great sense of humor. It did not feel slow and it’s a good length. Highly recommend.

Konigsburg does a great job with the family dynamic - and the complications of friendships, too. She has a wonderful way of leaving out information instead of explicitly stating everything - which actually relates to the story, I guess: what parents know, what they say about what they know (and to whom), what they don't say; what kids know and say and don't say.

This is a great book that no one knows about. It's about a boy who's mother Nd brother coach his baseball team. The boy is 12 years old and is having a lot of problems in his live. People are making fun of him because his mom is coaching his team, he is always getting into fights with his brother and he doesn't have a lot of friends. Very realistic.

The story is sweet, but wow--does this book show its age. The funniest thing to me was the whole "Playgirl" side story. It wasn't until about halfway through the book that I realized it wasn't just bad editing, that "Playgirl" hadn't actually been invented when this was published and it was Konigsburg's pseudonym for "Playboy".

3.5 stars - an all-American, 1960s story of adolescence, family and baseball.

"Barry Jacobs and Hersch came to watch, too. They kept close to each other, and at first, I stayed with them. But we were like two fingers and a thumb, me being the thumb, a bit shorter and fatter and separated." Oh, the third-wheel thumb. It is definitely a sore experience to stick out.

"'MOTHER: 'I'm more worried that if he finds that he can't have that little corner of privacy at home, he'll look somewhere else for it. Bumming around with bad kids or staying out all night, or trying to do something really secret and really bad. If it becomes something worse, I'll step in.'
"AUNT THELMA: 'Why don't you just buy him the magazine?'
"MOTHER: 'Because it's not my place to give him permission to be a peeping tom into Playgirl. Just because I let him doesn't mean that I have to approve, does it? I don't have to approve of everything he does, do I? And I have to save my hard disapproving for the bad things.'"

I really like reading about thoughtful parenting. Do I agree with Mother? I agree with her about the privacy piece. But does she tacitly approve of the objectification of women?

This review is belated to the tune of 42 years, but having heard of E.L. Konigsburg's passing, I feel compelled to write about one of the favorite books of my adolescence, About the B'nai Bagels. My 11 year old self was captivated by Mark who seemed so much like me: a Jewish boy starting to come to grips with himself and his place in the world. Unlike Konigsburg's Mark, I wasn't on a baseball team and God did not live in the light fixture in my kitchen; but so much of his life felt authentic to me, and the warmly humorous banter sprinkled throughout the story easily could have come from my family's dinner table. Some may feel the universality of Mark's struggle is somehow compromised by the setting of the story, and perhaps this is a legitimate criticism of a piece of fiction aimed at adolescents, but if Laura Ingalls Wilder could give us a window into the life of a girl on the Plains in the 1800's, why not look in on this nice, Jewish boychik growing up in the 1960's? What could be bad?

E.L. Konigburg Weeks 2012, Book 5.