Roger Kahn : Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing about It a Game (Bison Book)

Acclaimed baseball writer Roger Kahn gives us a memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, a recollection of a life in journalism, and a record of personal acquaintance with the greatest ballplayers of several eras.

His father had a passion for the Dodgers; his mother’s passion was for poetry. Somehow, young Roger managed to blend both loves in a career that encompassed writing about sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Time.

Kahn recalls the great personalities of a golden era—Leo Durocher, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Red Smith, Dick Young, and many more—and recollects the wittiest lines from forty years in dugouts, press boxes, and newsrooms. Often hilarious, always precise about action on the field and off, Memories of Summer is an enduring classic about how baseball met literature to the benefit of both.

Amazon.com Review
Esteemed baseball writer Roger Kahn's Memories of Summer makes a fine companion to his earlier classic,The Boys of Summer. Both books plow similar soil--Kahn's roots in Brooklyn and his years covering the Dodgers with fertile prose--but the similarities end there. The new volume, subtitled "When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game," foregoes its predecessor's route of wistful melancholy and broken dreams for the exhilaration of the sport itself. Kahn focuses his considerable powers on the ways baseball permeated America's post-World War II ethos, and why, in an era less blemished by cynicism, baseball blossomed into a writer's playing field.