The Boys of Summer

This is one of the books that I had considered reading since I was a young man in love with baseball for the first time. In a sense, I'm glad I waited all these years to finally read it. I think that I would not have enjoyed it at 14 the way I did at 28. The book is beautiful elegy and mediation on a time long gone and the men who made up it's glory. They bear littler resemblance to the stars of today. I grew up with stories of the '52 World Series and the Dodgers. This book gave me the gift of being able to exprience a bit of what my grandfather and father shared on that October day in 1952 as Joe Black took the mound against the Yankees. I've always held the Dodgers in awe (the BRooklyn version at least) and this book allows me to see the men who made up those times as real people. Pee Wee Reese emerges as Kahn's hero in the baseball parts. I would argue that his father, Gordon, was almost as heroic to him. It is beautiful book about boys, their fathers, and the ties that bind us to what is still, even in this day and age, the single greatest game ever invented. This is a classic that should be read by every fan. Thank you, Mr. Kahn.

Roger Kahn was the beat writer who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s. This book tells the story of how Roger got the position he did and his experiences with the players. A really great depiction of basball in its hey day. Kahn really captures the essence of a simpler time in sports. The second part of the book is a great look into the life of a ball player after he has retired. Kahn tells of his visits with such Dodger greats as Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, and Gil Hodges after the end of their playing careers. And amazing book highly recomended to not only Dodger fans, but baseball fans. This book is easily one of the best wirtten works on Americas most notable past time.

While it's tempting to say simply that is the best baseball book ever written (I happen to think that it is), such a statement would do a disservice to the book. It's a great book -- period. Kahn's memoir of his life in Brooklyn and in the world beyond is really three books in one. First, it's an evocative story of growing up in the '30s and '40s in an intellectually challenging household that somehow (much to his mother's disgust) centered around the exasperating study of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Second, it's the tale of a young writer who at an astonishingly young age found himself covering the team he loved during two bittersweet seasons ('52 and '53) that ended in agonizing seven-game World Series losses to (who else?) the New York Yankees.Third, it's the story of how this no-longer-young writer went back to find the Boys of Summer long after their careers had ended. This is the most poignant section of the book: Kahn's finely etched portraits of the heroes of his youth, now ordinary men leading ordinary (but compelling) lives.What sets this book apart from the vast majority of books written about baseball (sports in general, really) is Kahn's respect for his subjects. Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Erskine, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, et al., emerge as three-dimensional characters capable of heroism and strong-willed determination as well as bitterness.To recount the individual stories contained in this book even briefly would not do justice to the book or to its subjects. It's a book best savored slowly, allowing its resonance to work its magic. The story of a vanished world and a vanished team, "The Boys of Summer" recreates both so vividly that between its pages, neither will ever die.

My mother brought this book years ago in a three books for a dollar deal. The other two are long gone, unread and forgotten. Between my brother and myself we read The Boys of Summer so thoroughly the copy we had split down the middle and eventually fell apart. One of the first things i did when i visited the US a while back was buy another copy of this wonderful book. At the very core of it lay two themes,courage and frustration. It covers Jackie Robinsons team of the early 50's. They were good but never quite good enough. Like the modern day Atlanta Braves the Brooklyn Dodgers kept running into a juggernaut called the New York Yankees. They say that for every winner there is a loser. Thats not true. For every winner there are thousands of losers. Only one team/person can hold up the trophy at the end of the season. The Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950's represent the rest of us, the also rans. Roger Kahn brilliantly brings those days back to life and by then covering the men after their glory days are long behind them the book transcends sports and becomes a study of humanity in all its fraility. The fact that the Dodgers moved away not long after finally breaking through in the World Series only intensifies the tragedy of it all. It says something that a white boy growing up on the other side of the world can come to admire someone like Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play Major League Baseball, whos deeds and presence are discussed at some length in the pages of this book. He is my only hero. The Boys of Summer is a classic. I would recommend it to anyone.

This is easily one of the best 5 books I've ever read. Although the book is obstensibly about the 1955 Brooklyn Dodger World Champions it is really about what happens to people (not just ballplayers) after they've reached their peak. The names are well known to anybody who follows baseball and one --Jackie Robinson-- to anybody who is familiar with American culture. Those names and their exploits are the hook, but what happens to the team members after their glorious victories are funny, sad, inspiring, depressing, poignant and always moving. Roger Kahn beautifully captures the sunsets of the lives of the people who were the '55 Dodgers. I'm a bit biased because I'm a lifelong Dodger fan (born in the year the Dodgers moved to L.A.) and I, of course, love baseball, but whenever I put down this book I felt I wasn't reading a "sports" book (a genre unfairly looked down upon). I was reading about Life. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.