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The Boys of Summer, in detail
The Boys of Summer is Roger Kahn's account of covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1950s, followed by his return visits in the late 1960s to find out what had happened to the players since. The Dodgers of that era — Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo — were an extraordinary team that never quite won the World Series until 1955, and whose home, Ebbets Field, was demolished after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958. The combination of athletic brilliance, racial history, and civic loss gave Kahn an unusually rich subject.
The book is structured in two parts. The first is memoir: Kahn's own family history, his father's influence on his love of baseball, his hiring at the Tribune, and his assignment to travel with the Dodgers during their 1952 and 1953 seasons. These sections are personal and sometimes digressive, but they establish why Kahn cared so much about what he saw. The second part — the return visits — is where the book becomes something harder to forget. He finds his former heroes aging, some gracefully and some not: a player who became a small-town hardware store owner, another who was left partially paralyzed by a car accident, another dying of cancer, Jackie Robinson's health declining from diabetes and grief over his son.
The racial dimension of the Dodgers story is handled with seriousness throughout. Robinson's breaking of baseball's color line in 1947 was the defining event for that team and for American professional sports, and Kahn does not treat it as resolved history. His conversations with Robinson in Robinson's final years — Robinson died in 1972, shortly after the book's publication — are among the most honest portraits of what integration actually cost the people who carried it.
What makes The Boys of Summer endure is its insistence on treating sports as a legitimate subject for serious attention. Kahn is not nostalgic in a sentimental way; he is clear-eyed about what his subjects endured and what they lost. The title comes from a Dylan Thomas poem about facing mortality, and the book earns that reference without overreaching it.
The big ideas
- 1.
The Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s were one of the most talented teams in baseball history and also one of the first integrated professional sports teams, with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe on the roster.
- 2.
Kahn's return visits to aging players twenty years later reframe the first half of the book: the brilliant athletes become men dealing with the ordinary consequences of time, injury, and changing fortune.
- 3.
Jackie Robinson emerges as the book's central moral figure. Kahn captures him near the end of his life — diabetic, nearly blind, grieving his son's death from drug overdose — still unreconciled to the cost of what he had achieved.
