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 Rating:
Summary: Hall of Fame Book
Comment: 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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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Great American Game
Comment: Baseball is integrated into the national consciousness unlike any sport. Football may be our most popular sport now, but baseball is intrinsically linked to our past and our future. The Boys of Summer is a semi-biographical tale of Mr. Kahn as a young reporter embedded with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950's. Written in a whimsical style befitting America's Past Time, Kahn weaves a complex tale of Jackie Robinson's Dodgers, experiencing everything from blind racism in the South, racial tension among players, the broken hearts after Bobby Thompson's "Shot Heard Round The World", elation of winning the pennant, and the heartbreaking losses to the hated cross-town rivals, the Yankees. It is a well-crafted glimpse into baseball history. It humanizes baseball legends such as Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, and Robinson himself as they lived their lives both during and after baseball.

The strength of this novel is Kahn's uncanny ability to strip away the legend, showing the humanizing flaws of the players, while maintaining their place as some of the most colorful and historically significant players in baseball history. The writing style has clear journalistic influences, it flows well, doesn't bog you down with needless metaphors, and delivers the facts quickly. Another unique aspect of this novel is how strongly Kahn's love of the game shows through. You make an emotional connection with these players in much the same way he himself developed that connection. Though he was reporter, his love of the Dodgers was always foremost in his mind.

If you are a baseball fan this book must be on your list of must-reads. Though we live decades after these famous Brooklyn Dodgers, we mustn't forget the tremendous feats these players achieved (particularly Robinson), and their incredible contributions to baseball history. One of the best baseball books ever written, and a must read for any fan.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: We are all "Boys of Summer".
Comment: How often do you read a book that you don't want to end? "The Boys of Summer" is one of them.

How often do you read a book at exactly the right time in your life, at a time when you are the most in tune with what the book is really about? For me, "The Boys of Summer" and I have met at just the right time.

It's not like I've been unaware of this book. Being a baseball fan, it's presence is just about as constant as it could ever be. As a lifelong New York Yankees fan, "The Boys of Summer" has always been "that old book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who the heck cares?" Well, score that a two base error.

Waking up to the realities and disappointments of middle age is not all that much fun, nor is it frequently reckoned on it's own terms with necessary insight. It's usually a lot easier to go to sleep, get up, go to work, and watch those ballgames nearly every day. Now that's something to hold onto. The daily cacophony of two children is a great distraction, particularly if one is happy to be distracted.

But what of the inevitable changes wrought by the inexorable march of time? How long should one dwell on realizing that not only are you as old as the ballplayers you watch on TV, but that it was twenty-five years since you realized it? When in the world did our favorite players become coaches and hall of fame candidates, to be seen only at old timers days? Am I an old timer now? What...???

"The Boys of Summer" does us a great and timely favor. It's a powerful reminder. It's a gentle and insistent reflection of ourselves and what our lives have done to us, and where we find ourselves now. What have we lost along the way? What have we gained?

The game of baseball has long endured. It is both unchanging and ever changing. It can be a great distraction. Author Roger Kahn shows how it can teach as well.

Baseball is youth. Enthusiastic, ebullient, exciting, entrancing. Baseball will always retain it's youth. as that is it's nature. But not us. Youth passes and passes away, as it must. Life goes on. We must make do, and my oh my, isn't that a bit sad?

I wasn't around for the Golden Age of Baseball, the 1950's in New York with the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants fighting for supremacy in New York, although the team from the Bronx seemed to mostly come out on top. "The Boys of Summer" is wonderfully evocative of that era, and I really appreciate the human dimension that Kahn so ably weaves into the book. The old ballplayers really come alive in full color, and of course black and white. Who cares about the Brooklyn Dodgers? Well, bless my soul, now I do!

I look forward to when my two young children are old enough to watch baseball with me. I miss talking baseball with my now dead father.

Holy cow.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Absolute classic
Comment: The reason I gave this book five stars is because I'm not allowed to give it six. This is simply the best baseball book I've ever read, and that's a fairly long list. I can't say enough positive things about this book.

It should be noted that I was a sports writer for 8 years and was early in my career when I read this book. I was enthralled by the first part of the book, which not only provided insight into two prototypical Brooklyn Dodgers seasons (great team, fell short of winning a championship), but it also took me into the fascinating world of journalism in the 1950s. It was exciting and eye-opening.

The second part of the book includes stories of Kahn visiting players from those teams many years later. You can't believe how interesting this is. The story of Billy Cox is touching. The story of Duke Snider offers great insight into the superstar outfielder. Roy Campanella's story is tragic. I've read three or four books by Kahn and all are good, but this is at an entirely different level. Someday I will read this book again when it's been long enough so that it can feel like I'm reading it for the first time.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Book That Made Me A Baseball Fan
Comment: Never really a dedicated sports fan, but a voracious and eclectic reader familiar with its reputation, I approached THE BOYS OF SUMMER fully expecting an excellent book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, but unprepared for what I found.

Less a team history than a memoir of the best of times and the worst of times, author Roger Kahn, a former sportswriter for the late NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, has accomplished the nearly impossible task of preserving an era in amber.

At the outset, we are introduced to Kahn's endearingly pretentious and unusual family: The father, Gordon, called "Gore-DON" by his wife, Olga, both teachers; the maternal grandfather, Dr. Rockow, a refugee of the Russian Revolution who obtained his Doctorate of Dentistry in Bern, Switzerland; the deceased grandmother, who, before her death at forty, had acheived a European M.D. Degree in an era when most women in her world were barely literate, much less successfully professional; the younger sister, Emily, stricken with polio; and Roger himself, a well-educated young man whose passion was Dodger baseball.

[A previous reviewer is critical of the "Marxism" of the book, but obviously, s/he did not read past page thirty; in painting us a living portrait of his family, Kahn tells us that they read, among many others, "Karl Marx and Freud," and refers affectionately to his Russian-Jewish immigrant grandfather as an "old Marxist toothpuller." Kahn's family was somewhat unusual for its time in being stolidly and successfully middle-class and firmly dedicated to Middle European humanist intellectualism in Depression-era, overwhelmingly blue-collar Jewish Brooklyn; but to call this book "Marxist" or equate it with DAS KAPITAL is to say that THE CAT IN THE HAT is equivalent to GRAY'S ANATOMY because it was written by a Dr. Seuss.]

Living within view of Ebbet's Field, baseball was central to Roger's summer universe. This centrality was reinforced by his erudite father, who, when not discussing Joyce and Flaubert at the dinner table, was playing endless games of catch with his son and regularly taking him to games. With no appreciation of sports, Olga, "who had pretentions toward atheism" pleaded with God to intervene: "Please let him read one book; just ONE book." God's choice for Roger was FUNDAMENTALS OF PITCHING, which he carried around with him for weeks.

Whether Olga appreciated it or not, Roger was developing a Love For The Game, and he became the HERALD TRIBUNE's point man at Ebbet's Field just as the Dodgers emerged from a decades-long obscurity to become not only one of the preeminent franchises in baseball history, but also an historic team.

The Brooklyn Dodgers had always been iconoclastic. The only Major League team representing only a portion of it's home city (granted, Brooklyn had been an independent city until 1898), the team members lived locally and were well-known in their various Brooklyn neighborhoods.

From 1921 to 1938, the Dodgers were barely competitive. A chronically bankrupt franchise locally beloved but belittled as "dem bums," the fog began to lift in the War Years. The Dodgers captured a pennant in 1941. From 1941 to 1945 they played hard, but wartime manpower needs kept the team from truly excelling. It was not until 1947 that the Dodgers blossomed.

And as they blossomed, they made history as well, being the first modern Major League team to sign a black player, Jackie Robinson. Despite being vilified by certain elements, Robinson was MVP and led them to stellar heights. And despite a plethora of personal opinions about Robinson, the team as a whole responded positively to Robinson's amazing energy, and played magnificently for the next decade. Though not every Dodger was dedicated to Civil Rights, only one, aptly named Dixie Walker, asked to be traded, and was. The rest eventually accepted Number 42 as a teammate, and either liked him or loathed him for himself.

Perennial Pennant winners, they nonetheless could never overcome the dominance of their crosstown American League rivals, the Yankees, even in 1953, when they statistically outplayed the famed Murderers' Row team of 1927. The Dodger lament was always "Wait 'Til Next Year." It was not until 1955 that they could proudly claim, "This IS Next Year!"

But by then, the team had aged, Robinson was gone, and Kahn, too, had moved on. The last trolleys ran in Brooklyn in October of 1956, and with no more trolleys to dodge, the Dodgers vanished from Brooklyn in 1957 and took up residence in Los Angeles. Kahn ends the first half of his book by recounting the death of his father, but it is only one ending among many in that time.

Part Two of THE BOYS OF SUMMER brings us The Boys of Summer" in their autumn. Written in 1971, the book provides a series of encapsulated snapshots of each of the former team members in their fifties, some fat, some thin, some embittered, some wistful, some successful and some lost in time. The Boys in their age largely returned to their roots, most of them to little towns in the South and Midwest where they ran lumberyards, coached Little League, and were Presidents of their local Rotaries. Each has a story to tell, and so much of what made the Dodgers a truly great team is revealed in these pages.

Jackie Robinson stands out. It is hard, sixty years later, to realize how daring owner Branch Rickey was to sign Robinson at that time, and how difficult Robinson's journey was. "Brown v. Board of Education" was still seven years in the future, Jim Crow was rampant, Dr. King's Montgomery Bus Boycott was a decade away, and still Robinson overcame all obstacles, mostly because of his iron determination off the field and his spectacular talent on the field, attributes which his teammates, and then his opponents, came to respect.

The team's sudden, unexpected departure from Brooklyn is still lamented, and then-owner Walter O'Malley is still hated for it: "If a Brooklynite with a gun has only two bullets and Hitler, Mussolini and O'Malley are his targets, who does he shoot? O'Malley---twice."

Although some reviewers accuse Kahn of revisionism in his treatment of O'Malley, a close reading of the last chapters reveals something different. While most Brooklynites' long-standing hatred of O'Malley is real, it is the hatred of the townsman for the corporation that closes the mill, throwing the factory town into crisis---personal, and yet remote.

The bitterness remains. The Los Angeles Dodgers are still often referred to as the Los Angeles Traitors. In this reviewer's family, Dodger defeats, particularly to the Mets at Shea or to the Yankees, are greeted with, "Take that! That's what you get for leaving!" And it's been fifty years since they've gone. Of course, the Dodgers were in Brooklyn for seventy years beforehand.

Kahn's hatred of O'Malley is more immediate and visceral than the average fan's. He so clearly utterly despises O'Malley, who comes across as a self-proclaimed Manhattanite, a rude, self-righteous, pompous, wealthy and greedy snob, a businessman with no interest in baseball, a seeker only of the greenback who cared not at all for fan affections, and who dismissed Brooklyn as the Provinces; in short a man who deserved, and perhaps even wanted, to be hated.

The Irish Catholic O'Malley proclaimed himself a "Tory." He fined staffers a dollar each time they mentioned Branch Rickey by name. Robinson was a showboater in his estimation, and it was New York's fault the Dodgers left---if Brooklyn had wanted the team Brooklyn should have met his demands for a new stadium and other concessions.

With no Love of The Game, O'Malley's decision to move the team was based, solely and selfishly, on his desire to line his own pockets (he was always notoriously cheap with fans, players, and staffers), and to create his own power dynasty far from the interference of the New York Elites, to whom he was an also-ran.

Many people have written that the Dodgers left because "Brooklyn was changing" as "white flight" drove the middle classes to the suburbs. This ignores the fact that many areas did not change demographically, and that the process was neither sudden nor total. It also discounts the fact that minorities are not immune to an appreciation of the National Pastime. It ignores the fact that the Dodger departure was not so much an effect as a cause of these changes. Local historians mark 1957 as the end of an era in Brooklyn history.

Lastly, although the Borough was changing, it was also remaining the same, as the home of newly-arrived immigrant minorities. Brooklyn could (and should) have remained the home of this beloved team. It was thriving and would have continued to thrive. As Kahn says: "In a perfect world, Brooklyn would have the Dodgers and the Mets would be in Los Angeles."

Would that it were.

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