The best baseball books are autobiographical. This is because baseball is the most measurable of games. We can look at a player’s statistics and the box scores of games and know the bones of the sport. The flesh of the sport is in autobiography.
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn is two books. The first part is a memoir about growing up in Brooklyn, what the Dodgers meant to the writer and his father, and about what it was like to cover the Dodgers as a young reporter. The second part consists of chapters devoted to different players. Kahn, like Ritter in The Glory of Their Times, tracked down players to find our what their lives were like after the Brooklyn Dodgers. In Ritter’s case, he was meeting men he had only read and heard about. Kahn was reacquainting himself with men he already knew, or thought he knew. The two parts combine to create the most critically acclaimed baseball book ever written.
Kahn covered the Brooklyn Dodges for the New York Herald Tribune for two seasons, 1952-1953, as the beat writer. This was the Brooklyn Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Gil Hodges. This is the Dodger team that lost two World Series in the row to the Yankees. These are the Dodgers of baseball legend, when New York was the capital of baseball.
Kahn is a remarkable writer whether he is exploring his relationship with his father and their shared love of the Dodgers or is chronicling the after-baseball life of Dodger great Carl Furillo. He tells his stories with love and compassion. The result is literature that even a non-baseball fan could love. For a baseball fan, this is one of the top two or three books ever written about the game.