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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
It wasn't as good as I expected it to be, but it wasn't bad. Needed more baseball.
I have never read historical sports nonfiction and I am also not a fan of the Dodgers specifically. However I love history and baseball and this book really sat well with me. I enjoyed learning BIG names I wasn’t familiar with, like Joe Black who played ball at Morgan State, just minutes down the road from where I currently live.
Loved getting to hear stories from ‘The Boys of Summer’, sparking warm feelings of nostalgia.
Loved getting to hear stories from ‘The Boys of Summer’, sparking warm feelings of nostalgia.
Certainly, this book does not need another adoring review from a nostalgic fan who never saw the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers play. It is universally regarded as a classic in its field. I am an avid baseball fan who devours baseball books yet, amazingly, I never read it. I always thought that this was little more than a fan's love letter to his favorite team, a perennial also-ran who couldn't get past the mighty Yankees. It is not. This book is so much more than that: it is a document of an era and a reflection upon that era and the ways that our society changed during the 15 or so subsequent years.
In ways perhaps unique in baseball literature, Roger Kahn manages to bring alive the feeling of the era. In a poignant poetic style, Kahn describes growing up as a Dodger fan, and the trials and tribulations of the 1952-53 Dodgers, as viewed from the perspective of a fan and a young news writer. Much of it is cast in a rosy glow; yet all the attendant ugliness of the era is neither ignored nor dismissed. It seems somewhat diminished however, as bad things typically happened to other people. The most touching moments are Kahn's personal moments, be they with his family or his team.
The second part of the book, in which years later, Kahn seeks out the members of his team, takes the narrative to a much higher plane. Not merely asking the aging idols to nostalgically remember "the good old days", he instead prods greater reflection from the men. As aging athletes, they all had to come to terms with their mortality in ways that the rest of us do not, and at an age that the rest of us do not. Most of us do not start really feeling our age until our children are grown, and our careers are winding down, and we are facing retirement. Athletes reach that point in life far earlier than the rest of us. While a man (or woman) working, say in the insurance industry, will continue to grow and become more capable throughout their working career, an athlete must change careers, if he is lucky, in his late 30's.
This particular group of athletes was remarkable for another reason. They played alongside Jackie Robinson, and thus desegregated major league baseball, and thereby, personified a great deal of hope for a great many men and women. Hope that not only could Black Americans achieve the same success as white Americans, but that they could get along with each other in the process. By being on the same team, the same side, men who otherwise might have been stunted by their own preconceptions and limitations and bigotries learned to admire and even like other men very different from them.
They also aged during a very tumultuous period in America's cultural development. The Vietnam War was at its peak while Kahn wrote this book, black-white relations in America were perhaps at their most volatile ever. Two players saw their sons fight in Vietnam and return changed - one mentally, the other physically and mentally. Another had a special needs child, at a time when there still were not many services for such children. Other players had come from backgrounds where blacks were not welcome, and returned to such places, no longer sharing that feeling. You get the sense in this book that they are no longer at one with their hometown because of their experiences playing alongside black men.
Plus, the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Their team no longer even existed. The LA Dodgers were not the Brooklyn Dodgers. Truly, an era had ended. Not an era of innocence, nor one that could really be considered "the good old days", although we are often wont to refer to the 1950's as both. But an era of growth, of optimism, of shared experiences for these athletes, and perhaps, vicariously, for their fans.
In ways perhaps unique in baseball literature, Roger Kahn manages to bring alive the feeling of the era. In a poignant poetic style, Kahn describes growing up as a Dodger fan, and the trials and tribulations of the 1952-53 Dodgers, as viewed from the perspective of a fan and a young news writer. Much of it is cast in a rosy glow; yet all the attendant ugliness of the era is neither ignored nor dismissed. It seems somewhat diminished however, as bad things typically happened to other people. The most touching moments are Kahn's personal moments, be they with his family or his team.
The second part of the book, in which years later, Kahn seeks out the members of his team, takes the narrative to a much higher plane. Not merely asking the aging idols to nostalgically remember "the good old days", he instead prods greater reflection from the men. As aging athletes, they all had to come to terms with their mortality in ways that the rest of us do not, and at an age that the rest of us do not. Most of us do not start really feeling our age until our children are grown, and our careers are winding down, and we are facing retirement. Athletes reach that point in life far earlier than the rest of us. While a man (or woman) working, say in the insurance industry, will continue to grow and become more capable throughout their working career, an athlete must change careers, if he is lucky, in his late 30's.
This particular group of athletes was remarkable for another reason. They played alongside Jackie Robinson, and thus desegregated major league baseball, and thereby, personified a great deal of hope for a great many men and women. Hope that not only could Black Americans achieve the same success as white Americans, but that they could get along with each other in the process. By being on the same team, the same side, men who otherwise might have been stunted by their own preconceptions and limitations and bigotries learned to admire and even like other men very different from them.
They also aged during a very tumultuous period in America's cultural development. The Vietnam War was at its peak while Kahn wrote this book, black-white relations in America were perhaps at their most volatile ever. Two players saw their sons fight in Vietnam and return changed - one mentally, the other physically and mentally. Another had a special needs child, at a time when there still were not many services for such children. Other players had come from backgrounds where blacks were not welcome, and returned to such places, no longer sharing that feeling. You get the sense in this book that they are no longer at one with their hometown because of their experiences playing alongside black men.
Plus, the Dodgers left Brooklyn. Their team no longer even existed. The LA Dodgers were not the Brooklyn Dodgers. Truly, an era had ended. Not an era of innocence, nor one that could really be considered "the good old days", although we are often wont to refer to the 1950's as both. But an era of growth, of optimism, of shared experiences for these athletes, and perhaps, vicariously, for their fans.
A book I first read when I wouldn't have considered myself a baseball fan, now I am. It's more than a sports book and that helps make it one of the best books dedicated to a sport you will read.
One more book I'm stunned to NOT find on high school reading lists in the US because it's hard to find a better "Making of America" tale, or one so eloquently written.
Khan has a unique subject at his hand. The integration of major league baseball when baseball was by far the number one sport in the nation, so far ahead that it would have been hard to claim professional boxing - then number 2 - was even in the race. And Khan has the good fortune to find this tale set in that All - American City, Brooklyn, with its working class antithesis of glittering New York next door. And finally the author is given an audacious cast of characters, from Branch Rickey, to Jackie Robinson, to Pee Wee Reese.
Blessed by having this view of immortality handed him as a young man, as a reporter for the NY Herald-Tribune, Khan pays the gods back for that gift by doing the hard work in the second half of the book, by searching out now old heroes and trying together to make sense of it all.
Delightful, exciting, and challenging in its first half , The Boys of Summer becomes insightful, unblinking, and threatening in the second. You will hurt just as hard as you have cheered - which is truly the story of all the 1946-1957 Brooklyn Dodgers, within the team and without.
Khan has a unique subject at his hand. The integration of major league baseball when baseball was by far the number one sport in the nation, so far ahead that it would have been hard to claim professional boxing - then number 2 - was even in the race. And Khan has the good fortune to find this tale set in that All - American City, Brooklyn, with its working class antithesis of glittering New York next door. And finally the author is given an audacious cast of characters, from Branch Rickey, to Jackie Robinson, to Pee Wee Reese.
Blessed by having this view of immortality handed him as a young man, as a reporter for the NY Herald-Tribune, Khan pays the gods back for that gift by doing the hard work in the second half of the book, by searching out now old heroes and trying together to make sense of it all.
Delightful, exciting, and challenging in its first half , The Boys of Summer becomes insightful, unblinking, and threatening in the second. You will hurt just as hard as you have cheered - which is truly the story of all the 1946-1957 Brooklyn Dodgers, within the team and without.
I loved this book when I first read it as a senior in high school and I loved it on re-read now. It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.
"It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer."
A terribly poetic memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers, right before their move to California, and how teams, family, baseball seasons, cities, careers, all are helpless to stay as they are. The season always ends, no matter how brilliantly warm those dog days can be.
A terribly poetic memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers, right before their move to California, and how teams, family, baseball seasons, cities, careers, all are helpless to stay as they are. The season always ends, no matter how brilliantly warm those dog days can be.
This book is for some who truly understands baseball...not just a fan ofbaseball books.
The first half of the book covers the beginning of Kahn's career in newspaper and eventually covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. At times, this was a struggle for me to read.
The second half is devoted to Kahn visiting players 10 years after the Brooklyn team. Each adjusted to life in unique ways. Some had it better then others. This was my favorite part of the book, but stats were still way over my head. My favorite bits always included Jackie Robinson.
The first half of the book covers the beginning of Kahn's career in newspaper and eventually covering the Brooklyn Dodgers. At times, this was a struggle for me to read.
The second half is devoted to Kahn visiting players 10 years after the Brooklyn team. Each adjusted to life in unique ways. Some had it better then others. This was my favorite part of the book, but stats were still way over my head. My favorite bits always included Jackie Robinson.