The Boys of Summer

Rating:
Summary: A Golden Summer Long Ago
Review: It seems strange, looking back over the decades, to think that America seemed so close to perfect. The war was won, everyone had a job, family values ruled, and the Dodgers were in Brooklyn.

What more could you want? Off-hand I can think of any number of things, beginning with an end to racial segregation, but at least in that respect the Dodgers showed the way.

It must have been some lucky fate that guided Roger Kahn over the Brooklyn bridge all those years ago. He could have written a series of articles and forgotten all about the time he spent with the Dodgers. But he didn't. He revelled in the team, got to know the players, manager, staff and owner. The way the dynamics worked, the internal politics, the inside information.

And then he recalled those golden days for us, along with the players, years and years later, in what has got to be the best baseball book ever written. We look back through his eyes, and the eyes of those boys of summer, at a magic moment in America's history.

Were they just doing their jobs, those golden boys? Just throwing and hitting a ball around? Or were they conscious of their role in history? Do we read things into this book that weren't there? Do we see that season through misty watercolour memories of the way we were?

Up to the reader, I guess, but for me, I go back time and again to Brooklyn and that great team, so superbly described by Roger Kahn.

If you love baseball (and who doesn't?) then you must read this book. To understand what once was, and will ever be so long as summer comes and young men gather to throw a baseball around a diamond.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic about Baseball -- and Life
Review: Kahn's bittersweet remembrance of the 1952-53 Brooklyn Dodgers and his late father is more than a baseball book, yet it's one of the best baseball books ever written. Kahn puts the reader squarely in Ebbets Field in pre-urban decline Brooklyn. I was just as moved by the updated (circa 1971) look at the ex-players, an omission in too many other books. Kahn's 1998 effort "Memories of Summer" adds illumination. Anybody who liked the movie "Field of Dreams" should read this book. "The Boys of Summer" is a classic about baseball, and about life.

Rating:
Summary: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Baseball Classic - for the fans, by a fan!
Review: New York City in the '40s and '50s ~ twenty-three of forty pennant winners during those two decades came from the city (including the '59 LA Dodgers). Eight times in twenty years, the city enjoyed a subway series; thirteen times the World Series champion came from New York. Imagine being a baseball fan in New York; could there be a better time and place to be a fan? Imagine loving the game and adoring the Dodgers, all the while, living in Brooklyn and growing-up in the shadow of Ebbets Field. Imagine then, your chosen career path offers you the opportunity to be the Dodgers beat reporter in the early '50s.

Sit back and let Roger Kahn take you on a trip to Brooklyn in the 1950s. It's part baseball, part memoir, and a part Americana that is likely gone forever. The book is a moving tribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the city in which they played. It's all about a special relationship between the team, the city, and its fans. Some critics argue the book is self-indulgent, imposing too much of Kahn's personal life onto the baseball story. I would argue that Kahn is part of the story. He is not only writing about the Dodgers' and their fans, he is a Dodgers fan. There is no way the author could write an emotional tribute without the emotions.

Pay special attention to the detail in Kahn's account. He is a baseball reporter before the internet and ESPN, when an fan's only real contact with the team came from newspapers and radio. His access to the Dodgers is remarkable and his detail spot-on. You follow the team and its players through all the emotional ups and downs of two major league baseball seasons. You go inside the game, as seen from the Dodgers' locker room, with a team that is on the forefront of racial integration. Finally, you visit the Dodgers again after the game ends. The players are grown up, grown old and have re-entered the real world. It is Kahn's continuing tribute to those players that meant so much to Brooklyn and the team. The Boys Of Summer is a book about being a baseball fan written by a baseball fan! It's all about respecting the game and appreciating the players who play it. Baseball fans will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: A Baseball Classic - for the fans, by a fan!
Review: New York City in the `40s and `50s ~ twenty-three of forty pennant winners during those two decades came from the city (including the '59 LA Dodgers). Eight times in twenty years, the city enjoyed a subway series; thirteen times the World Series champion came from New York. Imagine being a baseball fan in New York; could there be a better time and place to be a fan? Imagine loving the game and adoring the Dodgers, all the while, living in Brooklyn and growing-up in the shadow of Ebbets Field. Imagine then, your chosen career path offers you the opportunity to be the Dodgers beat reporter in the early `50s.

Sit back and let Roger Kahn take you on a trip to Brooklyn in the 1950s. It's part baseball, part memoir, and a part Americana that is likely gone forever. The book is a moving tribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the city in which they played. It's all about a special relationship between the team, the city, and its fans. Some critics argue the book is self-indulgent, imposing too much of Kahn's personal life onto the baseball story. I would argue that Kahn is part of the story. He is not only writing about the Dodgers' and their fans, he is a Dodgers fan. There is no way the author could write an emotional tribute without the emotions.

Pay special attention to the detail in Kahn's account. He is a baseball reporter before the internet and ESPN, when an fan's only real contact with the team came from newspapers and radio. His access to the Dodgers is remarkable and his detail spot-on. You follow the team and its players through all the emotional ups and downs of two major league baseball seasons. You go inside the game, as seen from the Dodgers' locker room, with a team that is on the forefront of racial integration. Finally, you visit the Dodgers again after the game ends. The players are grown up, grown old and have re-entered the real world. It is Kahn's continuing tribute to those players that meant so much to Brooklyn and the team. The Boys Of Summer is a book about being a baseball fan written by a baseball fan! It's all about respecting the game and appreciating the players who play it. Baseball fans will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: A Book and Team for the Ages
Review: One of the first baseball books I read was Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. I recently reread the book and it hasn't lost any of it's original impact. This isn't a book strictly about baseball, it is a book about life.

Having reread the book I was struck by how much I enjoyed the first part of the book which functions as an autobiography of the authors youth. The parts about his father and mother were very poignant. The reveleation about the importance of a simple game in people's relationships hit close to home.

The second part of the book deals with the players and their stories. Sadly so many of these men have now passed away Robinson, Hodges, Reese, and Campanella. Their stories are powerful but what was even more fascinating to me were the stories of the lesser known players. Billy Cox working in a bar, Carl Furillo working as a labourer, and especially the story of Carl Erskine and his mentally disabled son Jimmy.

I would recommend this book to anybody interested in baseball but I would also urge anybody to read it because it's the story about life, the good and the bad, and the past and the present.

Rating:
Summary: Half a Good Book
Review: Roger Kahn has shamelessly used the attraction of the great Brooklyn Dodgers to lure people into reading what turns out to be his autobiography/confession/pyscho-therapy session. Instead of concentrating his entire effort on the great Dodger players of the 50's he exposes the reader to his own childhood of overbearing parents, sex-crazed housekeepers and personal issues of inadequacies. The half of the book that concentrated on the players was excellent, but with so much time wasted on his personal life that we as baseball fans have no interest in, it has been turned into a mediocre volume and definitely not for younger readers. If one can sort through the muck of his life story it may have value as a reference book, but otherwise it has very little to offer in the way of entertaining reading.

Rating:
Summary: Easily One of the Best Baseball books of ALL TIME
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The best book ever on baseball?
Review: Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" may very well be the best book written about baseball. It certainly lies in the Top Ten of any self-respecting baseball fan's own personal list. It is beautifully written, often poetic. It is elegiac yet alive and vibrant.

The book is neatly split into two parts. The first is a reporter's account of his own love of baseball, specifically the Brooklyn Dodgers, while growing up there. The era comes alive with descriptions of his neighborhood, of the city, of what baseball meant to kids at that time.
Of how baseball bonded fathers to sons, children to adults, neighbors.
In that scenario, imagine the fortune of this young reporter who gets the dream job to end all dream jobs: follow the Dodgers.
You get to watch baseball, played by your favorite team and then write about it. And get paid!
It's a lovely evocation of the time...things aren't like the way they used to be. The earth doesn't stop rotating when the Dodgers come back in the bottom of the ninth.
It used to.
You get a sense of how important and vital the Dodgers were to that community. Daily conversations were incomplete without a mention of last night's game. Stickball was everything. A glove was gold.
The parts about being a member of the press in Manhattan for a big newspaper are terrific. I swear I could hear the chattering typewriters, the traffic outside the window, the tinkling of ice in a bar glass...you are there. As the golden era of baseball was ending, so was an era of newspapers. Soon TV would supersede the papers as the way to get your news. The influence of the newspapers on public opinion (and vice versa) would never again reach the heights they did here.
As history, there is no better concise snapshot of that hallowed Jackie Robinson era than this book.

The second half of the book has Mr. Kahn travelling around the country decades after the Brooklyn team has ceased to exist. He finds the players...Gil Hodges, Jackie, Pee Wee, Duke, Clem, Erskine, Billy Cox...and gives us a separate little chapter on each player. We find out what has happened after baseball for them, Campanella's injury, Robinson's and Erskine's family problems, if they stayed with baseball (Hodges) or got completely away from it (Cox)...
...it finishes the story of that Brooklyn Dodger team. It also gives Mr. Kahn a chance to return to that era and write about it from the perspective that age and time will frequently offer.

If you love baseball, and you love to read, there is no better book. Sure, an argument could be made for a Halberstam book, or someone's well written autobiography, but they would be coin flips.
"The Boys of Summer" may arguably be equalled, but I doubt if it will ever be bettered.

Rating:
Summary: The best book ever on baseball?
Review: Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" may very well be the best book written about baseball. It certainly lies in the Top Ten of any self-respecting baseball fan's own personal list. It is beautifully written, often poetic. It is elegiac yet alive and vibrant.

The book is neatly split into two parts. The first is a reporter's account of his own love of baseball, specifically the Brooklyn Dodgers, while growing up there. The era comes alive with descriptions of his neighborhood, of the city, of what baseball meant to kids at that time.
Of how baseball bonded fathers to sons, children to adults, neighbors.
In that scenario, imagine the fortune of this young reporter who gets the dream job to end all dream jobs: follow the Dodgers.
You get to watch baseball, played by your favorite team and then write about it. And get paid!
It's a lovely evocation of the time...things aren't like the way they used to be. The earth doesn't stop rotating when the Dodgers come back in the bottom of the ninth.
It used to.
You get a sense of how important and vital the Dodgers were to that community. Daily conversations were incomplete without a mention of last night's game. Stickball was everything. A glove was gold.
The parts about being a member of the press in Manhattan for a big newspaper are terrific. I swear I could hear the chattering typewriters, the traffic outside the window, the tinkling of ice in a bar glass...you are there. As the golden era of baseball was ending, so was an era of newspapers. Soon TV would supersede the papers as the way to get your news. The influence of the newspapers on public opinion (and vice versa) would never again reach the heights they did here.
As history, there is no better concise snapshot of that hallowed Jackie Robinson era than this book.

The second half of the book has Mr. Kahn travelling around the country decades after the Brooklyn team has ceased to exist. He finds the players...Gil Hodges, Jackie, Pee Wee, Duke, Clem, Erskine, Billy Cox...and gives us a separate little chapter on each player. We find out what has happened after baseball for them, Campanella's injury, Robinson's and Erskine's family problems, if they stayed with baseball (Hodges) or got completely away from it (Cox)...
...it finishes the story of that Brooklyn Dodger team. It also gives Mr. Kahn a chance to return to that era and write about it from the perspective that age and time will frequently offer.

If you love baseball, and you love to read, there is no better book. Sure, an argument could be made for a Halberstam book, or someone's well written autobiography, but they would be coin flips.
"The Boys of Summer" may arguably be equalled, but I doubt if it will ever be bettered.