Baseball DIY

I just finished reading The Boys of Summer for the first time - and I have no idea why it has taken me so long to read this book. It's about the Brooklyn Dodgers back when they were the team that broke America's heart - and also the team that changed America. Robinson is there, along with Erskine, Reece, Hodges, Campanella - a crew of great players who took foreeevveerr to win the Series. They were classics on so many levels, and Kahn's job was to write about them during those moments when the whole country knew them by name. Twenty years later he decided to go see them again, individually, and find out what kind of men thay had become. It is heartbreaking to read some of it, particularly about Hodges and Campanella, but fascinating as well. It's weird, but I think this is the perfect baseball book and nonbaseball book, as it is great for fans of the game to see what it was like after the playing stopped, but it is also mostly about being a man, about being a certain kind of man who lived in a certain time - it's about being a good man I guess and that really has nothing at all to do with baseball. That's why I think that nonbaseball fans would love the book as well, because you don't have to have loved the Dodgers to love this book, heck - you don't even have to know them by name.

And it just shows even more why Gil Hodges has been screwed by the Hall of Fame!

Roger Kahn is a fantastic writer, a very honest one. I'm surprised that he was willing to reveal so much about his own relationship with his father in the book, although it goes towards the secondary theme of fathers and sons that runs through several of the sections (Jackie Robinson's loss is so bitter in this respect.) If Kahn had not been so honest, I don't think the book would have worked and now I want to read more of his stuff and see what else he had to share.

If by some chance you haven't read Boys, be aware that in some ways it is two separate books - how Kahn came to cover the Dodgers and what he learned there and then what happened when he visited the players 20 years later. As a complete book I thought it was great, but some readers seem to have been surprised by the two different parts. You have to hang in there with it though, you won't be disappointed.