Southern Arizona authors: Memoirs from Navajo land, Japan, Budapest; and more

• “A Bilagáana Boy among the Navajo” by Jay Jones. (BookBaby). $19.99 paperback; $9.99 e-book. 224 pp.

Sometimes when you read about a kid’s tough life, you’d like to reach in, grab the ostensibly responsible adults in it, and demand what the heck they were thinking. Such is the case reading this absorbing memoir by Dove Mountain resident Jay Jones.

Jay was only 6 years old when his father dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night to catch his mother naked in a hotel room with a strange man. Two years later, he would be forced to join his mother and the strange man — now her husband — on the Navajo Reservation, where he worked. It was not a happy arrangement. New husband Will and young Jay did not hit it off. Will whipped him savagely. His mother wanted him to take Will’s last name and sever ties with his beloved father. Additionally, as the bilagáana, the only white boy, in class, he was a natural target of taunting and bullying.

On the other hand, with both adults busy at work, Jay had kid-enviable unsupervised outdoor freedom. He played with knives, he played with fire, he ran freely around Window Rock — even climbing its iconic sandstone arch. He was embraced by one Navajo family, which included him in hogan trips and traditional gatherings (sometimes alcohol-risky); and by one rodeo family that had him competing on a bucking steer at 11. Pretty remarkable experiences for a kid.

Unfortunately, neither his four-year childhood reservation adventures nor his parents’ self-absorption served Jay well through adolescence. Jones does not whine, but neither parent was there for teenaged Jay. Suffice to say, he joined the Marines at 17.

“Bilagáana Boy,” promoted for both memoir-fans and for young adults, is a universally appealing story.

• “The Heart of It” by Alan Perry (Kelsay Books). $20 paperback; $9.99 Kindle. 55 pp.

Subjects slip seamlessly from the external world to the internal in this chapbook of luminous poems by Alan Perry: A washing machine wraps trouser legs around lingerie and becomes a warning against emotional stifling. The discovery of a new exoplanet inspires hope for connection. A speaker tries to save a struggling boxelder sapling by grafting a healthy oak twig onto it. Like a marriage, “trying to cultivate roots/… branches that breathe in unison.” An image of a snowfall nearly collapsing a mesquite tree becomes a reflection on time and a friend’s death, but ends with “the moments after snow melts,/ rivers come alive, reservoirs re-fill,/ depth gradually returns.”

Editor and poet Perry, who lives in Minnesota and Tucson, addresses relationships, love, the passage of time, and loss, but concludes with a sense of redemption or hope in this collection. Warm and affecting, it’s suitably titled “The Heart of It.”

• “Life, Love & Baseball in Japan: The Final Chapter” by James McKnight (Yellow and Black Tiger Press). $15.99 paperback; $7.99 Kindle. 215 pp.

When last we saw our Tucson boy, Santa Rita and UA grad James McKnight (in his memoir “Bad Foreigner”), he was settling down in rural Japan with his new wife Hitomi. “Life, Love & Baseball in Japan” completes his “Yellow and Black Fever” trilogy.

It opens with a report of the 2006 standings of the Japanese baseball club McKnight is fanatical about — the Hanshin Tigers. (They’re doing better, by the way, than last season.) Complicating his voracious fandom now are two new developments — the new wife and her mother at home and a new high-pressure job at a prestigious English-immersion middle school. They will inevitably cramp his style as a member of the drinking, jeering, fighting ZETT Supporters Club of the Tigers, whose carousing usually continues until the wee hours, even on work nights.

We could call this the Take Responsibility volume, for, as he does carry on carrying on to some degree, McKnight also accommodates family and career. He’s also learning Japanese culture — on one hand, inordinately joyless and disciplined at work (“I will enjoy my life after I retire”); on the other, zealously undisciplined at night. And that Japanese baseball fan culture is fanatical.

We see lots of play-by-plays in this book (how in the world can he recall these details?). Games — plus teaching challenges — structure the narrative of years 2006 to 2011, after which an unforeseeable and tragic event precipitates the McKnight family’s departure from Japan.

McKnight concludes his memoir by providing readers a welcome update on his family’s life and those of his friends he’s featured through his book.

Considering this year’s World Series stars, it’s not a bad time to dip into Japanese baseball culture.

• “Lives of a Budapest Jew: László Weisz, 1908 to 1995” by Leslie Varady (László Weisz) and Robert G. Varady (Wheatmark). $12.95 paperback. 211 pp.

We’re at a moment when memoirs like this are useful — both for the reality that the Holocaust generation is dying out, and for the current tenuousness of our democracy. Leslie Varady (László Weisz is his Hungarian name) was initially reluctant to commit his Nazi-era experiences in a full book, but his son Robert persuaded him to write short essays about people, places and experiences from his past. It’s those, plus additions from interviews and correspondences, that comprise this worthy work.

László Weisz (called “Laci” — pronounced “Lutzee”) was born in Pozsony (now Bratislava), Kingdom of Hungary, in 1908, to working-class, German- and Hungarian-speaking Jewish parents. His father, struggling to make a living, took advantage of a family offer, and moved his young family to Budapest. Taking advantage of connections would prove a lifeline for both his father and László.

László’s voice narrates the first two-thirds of the book — from his childhood through the war years. We follow his personal and professional life, rising antisemitism, and the gradual tightening of the Nazis around the Jewish population of Hungary. Having risen to comptroller of a large firm, he was pushed out in 1938 because he was a Jew. László then joined the extended family’s leather-working business, beginning another of the “Lives” referred to in the book’s title. We see him rounded up — only to escape — four times, from three forced labor camps and a death camp transport. His wife, Magda, describes privations in the Budapest ghetto.

“Robert’s Story” covers the post-war years when the family moved to France and then to the U.S., where László again made a successful professional rise as an accountant. Persistence, connections and “chutzpa,” according to his son, enabled this modest-born Hungarian success in the world.

• “Saltwood” by Leon Unruh (Meadowlark Press). $25 paperback; available in e-book. 352 pp.

Characters in this, Leon Unruh’s compelling second thriller featuring Nick Deveraux, are frequently controlled by overarching powers — from spy agencies through Big Oil, politics, and religion, to ad hoc militias.

We first saw Nick Deveraux in “Dog of the Underworld” (2013) as Nikolai Fyodorov, a Russian spy tasked with assassinating an American senator. An experienced killer (19 notches to date), he was nonetheless thwarted in his mission by another killer out to get him, and a love interest.

What we saw in Nick in “Dog of the Underworld” is further borne out in “Saltwood”: although he’s cold-blooded as an assassin, Nick is not cold-blooded as a character. While his boss was clear in the previous novel— a Russian spy-master named Karp — his handler in this book is unclear even to him. Is it the FBI that just released him unexpectedly from detention, or the Russians, who give him the target?

Unruh makes masterful use of his central Kansas setting, in which he himself grew up. It’s desolate, beastly hot, treeless, oil country; culturally evangelical and gun-toting MAGA. Nick takes on his assignment, which is to kill Kansas Senator Harriet Gayfeather, by signing on as her aide in the field. When he is nearly killed by an oil rig explosion, he confronts the corruption of Big Oil.

This novel deals with more contentious issues than the previous: shoot-‘em-up action is related to political lobbying, environmental contamination, gun rights, immigration, abortion, pastoral indiscretion, plus time-honored financial and marital cheating.

“Saltwood” is fast-paced and engaging. The style of former Texas, Kansas, and Alaska newspaper editor Unruh is rich and descriptive; and his central character is satisfyingly complex. Apparently, the next in the series will be set in Tucson, where Unruh currently lives. It’s something to look forward to.