Beyond the Boys of Summer: The Very Best of Roger Kahn Paperback - 2006 - 1st Edition

First line

I saw my first World Series game in 1920, seven years before I was born.

From the rear cover

Spanning half a century, the first comprehensive anthology of "sliders with social history," writings from the legendary sportswriter Roger Kahn

"This is my nineteenth book; all my life I've tried to write literature. I am aware that like Stan Musial or Ted Williams at the bat most of the time I've failed. But the critical word is 'try.' That effort has been a wonder of my life."
--Roger Kahn, from the Prologue

"Roger Kahn is the best of all with his sweet ear for the cadence of baseball talk."
--Donald Hall, New York Times Book Review

From the beginning of his career, as a young man reporting on sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Roger Kahn labored to create literature. After painstaking research and observation, he would sit down at his desk and "write like hell," working to turn everyday events into art. For the next fifty years, he never stopped.

Today, Roger Kahn is arguably the greatest sportswriter of his generation. Most famous for his modern classic, The Boys of Summer--hailed by James Michener as "the finest American book on sports"--Kahn is the author of eighteen books and the only baseball writer to have had three titles on the New York Times bestseller list. While he is best known for his "sweet ear" for America's national pastime, Kahn did not limit himself to baseball. With his literary style of reportage, he explored the depths of basketball and boxing, Judaism and McCarthyism, and even poetry in an unforgettable interview with one of his heroes, Robert Frost.

For the first time, Beyond the Boys of Summer presents a showcase of fifty years' worth of Kahn's celebrated work. Uniquely organized around life's stages--from youth to old age--the bookbrings you face-to-face with some of the greatest names in sports, including Muhammad Ali, Jack Dempsey, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Willie Mays, and Pete Rose. Beyond sports, Kahn takes you back to the tumultuous days of 1968 to witness the violent protest of a student rebellion. He brings you to a bar mitzvah for a hilarious and controversial look at the Jewish ceremony. And he invites you for a quiet walk through the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn, where his father instilled in him an undying love for baseball.

Harking back to a time when newspaper writing was an art form and Roger Kahn was one of its most accomplished masters, Beyond the Boys of Summer is nothing less than a literary accomplishment of the highest order.