Major Ponds: Traveling Chautauqua

By Stan Goldberg

-Alfredo Botello, the screenwriter for Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift and author of 180 Days and Spin Cycle

"At the intersection of the Holocaust, baseball, and jazz lies the novel 'Major Ponds Travelling Chautauqua." It is a brilliant and heart-wrenching meditation on the power of forgiveness.

Goldberg's story of an unlikely friendship between two men haunted by the ghosts of their past, by suffocating guilt, is moving and touching without ever veering into the maudlin. Goldberg does not flinch when rendering his characters and deftly revealing their pasts. They are flawed. They hurt. Their experiences are gut punches.

His prose is elegant without being distracting, letting his deeply inhabited characters breathe. The novel probes the question, what does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to let go of hurt? And its tentative answers are neither facile nor expected. Like life itself, the novel is spacious enough to contain a kaleidoscope of emotions, from shame to hope and everything in between.

Together, Sam and Jonathon, two dying men, on the surface quite dissimilar, create a bucket list so unexpected it will leave the reader in an introspective daze that sticks to the ribs, and makes one consider what really matters in the time we have on this spinning rock.-Frank Ostaseski, Founding Director of the Zen Hospice Project, and author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully

"Major Ponds will take your heart on a journey from tragedy to transformation. Along the way, the presence of death helps us to discover what matters most."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0990997022
• ISBN13: 9780990997023
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Wisdom to Practice Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"