The Boys of Summer » (Unabridged)

Roger Kahn is the award-winning author of The Boys of Summer, the classic bestseller about Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers and growing up in Brooklyn. He is the author of many other books whose subjects range from baseball to political activism, including Joe & Marilyn: A Memory of Love about the courtship and marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe and A Flame of Pure Fire, A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 1999 about boxing great Jack Dempsey.

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, wit, candor, and love.

“A work of high purpose and poetic accomplishment. The finest American book on sports.” James Michener

Paul Hogan

The Boys of Summer is a book of life . . . beautifully and above all . . . respectfully observed.