This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, wit, candor, and love.
"At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams." Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. What follows only gets better, deeper, more sentimental, and more bittersweet. The team, of course, is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience. It is the rare sports book that cannot be contained by the limitations of its genre; it is equal parts journalism, memoir, social history, and poetry.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
A Poignant Story of Baseball & Life:
Roger Kahn's magnificent portrayal of how the glory and anguish of a very talented, yet flawed baseball team---the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early '50s---became an aging group of men who experienced an inordinate amount of personal travail; and in the process, the reader is made acutely aware of how fleeting fame can be, and above all else, how transitory one's athletic prowess can be. Indeed, we all grow older, but in some cases, the aging process can bring about much pain over the course of just a few... more info
One of My All-time Favorite Books:
I never saw a game at Ebbets, and have only known them as the Los Angeles Dodgers, but I feel like I'm traveling with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952 while reading this book. It's a classic, and a must-read for anyone interested in Brooklyn, the Dodgers, or baseball generally. I can't put it down.
Memories of Mid Century Urban Baseball:
Another baseball classic written by a middle aged reporter about the life and times spent when he was young and there were Dodgers in Brooklyn.
"Dem Bums" resided in mid century Flatbush where the resident fans always cried "wait until next year!" and Roger Kahn provides 442 pages of sheer baseball delight.
Kahn's prose gives a sense of community and family in New York's most populated borough. You can sense that in visioning a walk on a mid summer's night in Brooklyn, in which you can follow... more info
Hall of Fame Book:
The genius of Roger Kahn's THE BOYS OF SUMMER is that it ultimately isn't about baseball. It is about the character of a group of men who magically matched the character of a place. The greatness of these Dodgers, the greatness of Brooklin was their perseverance in the face of defeat. And that, according to Kahn, is what makes them enduringly great. A must read. Deserves its reputation as a classic.
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