The Boys of Summer

By Roger Kahn,

Book cover of The Boys of Summer

Book description

Described by Richard William of The Guardian as 'the best sports book of 2013, and the best sports book of all time', The Boys of Summer is the story of the young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and went on to play for one…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Boys of Summer as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is one of those non-fiction books that reads like a novel. I wanted to keep turning the pages to follow the action and learn what it revealed about the characters. Technically the book covers more than a single season, but its nexus in the Brooklyn Dodgers’s 1955 season justified it as a selection for this category.

Roger Kahn gave us a classic that reads with the same urgency today as it did decades ago.

You don’t have to be a Dodgers fan to love this book about the Brooklyn teams and players from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. Well, it’s mainly about that. It’s also an autobiography as Kahn describes his childhood in the Borough of Churches (Brooklyn), and his years covering the Dodgers for one of the great newspapers of all time, the New York Herald Tribune.

Kahn was a graceful writer who beautifully relates the camaraderie and the turmoil from those years and lovingly shares the true, often touching stories of men like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, and their…

From Jerry's list on stories for baseball omnivores.

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