|
|
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
Great book -- period, April 27, 2000
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
 
|
|
|
|
|
|
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
A classic that should be required reading for any sports fan, May 18, 2003
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
More than a baseball book, July 29, 2002
To use a bit of a cliche, saying that is just a book about baseball is like saying Moby Dick is just a book about a whale. The Boys of Summer deals with one man's different perceptions of baseball players over time, as they change from demigods to mere mortals.The book starts with Kahn's recollections of childhood, when the Brooklyn Dodgers were heroes. As he reaches adulthood, he is lucky enough to get an opportunity to report on his favorite team, and he learns that these players are more flawed than they seem at a distance. In the second half of the book, it is years later, and Kahn sees what retirement has done to the players. There was a time that baseball was the dominant sport in the U.S., and there is something sad in seeing these idols - worshipped by kids and adults alike - forced into mundane existences by age. There is more: a lot of insights into racism and various players reactions to integration in baseball. This is a great book about the Boys of Summer, those Brooklyn Dodgers who played great ball from 1947 to 1957. For fans of baseball, this book is a must-read.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
The Book That Made Me A Baseball Fan, November 11, 2007
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" and 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Classic baseball book, August 26, 2004
As a young reporter, Roger Kahn got to cover the Brooklyn Dodgers for two seasons. In this book, he tells us about those two years, then goes back to visit the players several years later, describing their lives and hardships after baseball. The sad part of the book is that the players seemed to have more than their share of bad luck after leaving the game.
It's an interesting look at the Dodgers in the early 1950's and an even more interesting look at the indiviual players as people after they retired from the game. It also tells us a great deal about how the team was dealing with integration a few years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The best book ever on baseball?, July 4, 2004
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
Overrated, humorless and dull set of stories, January 30, 2001
I recently re-read Boys of Summer. When I first read it almost 30 years ago, I was puzzled why people thought so highly of it. Reading it again has not changed a thing, if anything, the book's flaws are even more apparent.Are the Dodgers a worthy subject of so much prose? Yes and no. They were a very good team over a number of years with a number of personalities on the field and in the front office. They had their greatest success just before the franchise moved. And they were the team of Jackie Robinson, himself the subject of many books, myths and legends. With all that great material, Kahn writes an extraordinarily dull book. The autobiographical parts of father and son being Dodger fans are hackneyed and pervaded by every cliché in the book. And for a person who covered the team as a beat writer for all of one full season, Kahn seems awfully smug about his knowledge of the Dodgers and dismissive of other writers who spent much more time with the team. The book also lacks even a trace of humor. As anyone who follows baseball on any level can vouch, baseball players can be very funny individuals. The Dodgers that are portrayed here are completely serious and boring. Perhaps that reflects the nature of the author. By the way, I was born and bred in Brooklyn and still spit when the name Walter O'Malley is mentioned. These Dodgers do not deserve the treatment given by Kahn.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A Golden Summer Long Ago, March 22, 2002
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 Do | |
