The Boys of Summer

First Edition, 1972, first printing, with 72 73 74 75 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 at bottom of the last page, an almost like-new hardcover with slight sunning to the cover and maybe read-once, with an unclipped ($8.95 t5op, 0372 bottom, front flap) dust jacket that has considerable rubbing and chipping at the spine ends, outer corners and edges, also small dog ears to the corners of the back flap, from Harper & Row. By Roger Kahn. 442 pages. SBN 06-012239-0.

"At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams." Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. What follows only gets better, deeper, more sentimental, and more bittersweet. The team, of course, is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience. It is the rare sports book that cannot be contained by the limitations of its genre; it is equal parts journalism, memoir, social history, and poetry.