The Boys of Summer

New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Book Club Edition (While stating First Edition on verso, lacks price on DJ and has book club indentation on outer rear board near bottom of spine). Hardcover. Very good/Good. xxii, 442 pages. Illustrations. Some wear to DJ edges. Roger Kahn (October 31, 1927 - February 6, 2020) was an American author, best known for his 1972 baseball book The Boys of Summer. In 2004, he was named as the fourth James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz. He was a lecturer at Yale University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Kahn began his newspaper career in 1948, when he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. A keen Brooklyn Dodgers fan, he reported on their games over the 1952 and 1953 seasons. He became sports editor for Newsweek in 1956, and editor-at-large of the Saturday Evening Post in 1963. His best-known book is The Boys of Summer (1972), which examines his relationship with his father as seen through the prism of their shared affection for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 2002, a Sports Illustrated panel placed The Boys of Summer second on a list of "The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time". In addition to The Boys of Summer, Kahn wrote books such as Good Enough to Dream, a chronicle of his year as the owner of a minor league baseball franchise; The Era 1947-57, an examination of the decade during which the three New York clubs - the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants - dominated Major League Baseball; and Memories of Summer, a look back at his youth and early career, plus extended pieces on New York baseball legends Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. He also wrote a biography of the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, entitled A Flame of Pure Fire. An account of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950's--the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson and set many other records besides--and what happened since to Jackie Robinson, Carl Erskine, Preacher Roe, Pee Wee Reese, Billy Cox, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, and the others. The Boys of Summer is a 1972 non-fiction baseball book by Roger Kahn. After recounting his childhood in Brooklyn and his life as a young reporter on the New York Herald Tribune, the author relates some history of the Brooklyn Dodgers up to their victory in the 1955 World Series. He then tracks the lives of the players (Clem Labine, George Shuba, Carl Erskine, Andy Pafko, Joe Black, Preacher Roe, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson and Billy Cox) over the subsequent years as they aged. The title of the book is taken from a Dylan Thomas poem that describes "the boys of summer in their ruin". Upon publication in 1972, The Boys of Summer was a commercial and critical success. It is often mentioned in discussions of the best baseball books. Heywood Hale Broun, in his Chicago Times review, praised Kahn for vividly re-creating a romantic era in the history of American sports and culture through memories "so keen that those of us old enough can weep, and those who are young can marvel at a world where baseball teams were the center of a love beyond the reach of intellect, and where baseball players were worshipped or hated with a fervor that made bubbles in our blood." George Frazier of The Boston Globe wrote "I cannot conceive that this year, nor next year, nor the year after that, will produce a more important book - a better written one, a more consistently engrossing one than this portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, as they were in the sinew and swiftness of their youth and as they are now." Conversely, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin, acknowledged that it is "perhaps the most celebrated baseball book of the last 50 years". In the Los Angeles Times' first-ever review of The Boys of Summer, Robert Kirsch alludes to the timelessness of the themes Kahn takes up through the lens of his own personal experiences, admitting "without embarrassment" that "this book brought me to tears more than once...and to laughter and to that quiet confrontation with enemy Time." As of 2015, the book has reportedly gone into ninety printings. In 2002, a Sports Illustrated panel placed The Boys of Summer second on a list of "The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time", describing it as "a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy."