Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelfh (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
... the best baseball book of the year. Some of the greatest names in baseball literature, including Roger Kahn, Bill James, John Holway, and Harold Seymour, among others, have won the CASEY. The award will be presented to the winning author at the annual Casey Banquet, held in the Cincinnati area on a date as yet to be determined. Problem is, how do you compare a wonderful children’s...
BrothersJudd Blog (Free subscription) | 11/18/2008
Benching Of A Legend : The prideful struggle of an aging Stan Musial to keep on playing ball has been a painful experience for everyone (Roger Kahn, 9/12/60, Sports Illustrated) Disturbing paradoxes surround an aging baseball player. He is old but not gray; tired but not short of breath; slow but not fat as he drives himself down the first base line. Long after the games, when the old...
The Post-Pessimist Association (Free subscription) | 11/17/2008
#48 -- "The Boys of Summer" by Roger Kahn Geez, I seem to have read a lot about baseball this year -- more than I've read about any sport I actually, you know, watch here in 2008. I'm relatively sure I read this one as a kid, but I probably wasn't too interested -- the Brooklyn Dodgers weren't even around any more, I wanted to read about teams like the Astros and Blue Jays! My loss (if...
Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelfh (Free subscription) | 11/11/2008
I was surprised to see this notice in the Publishers Weekly e-mail, until I saw the context: There probably has never been a better baseball book than Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, which was a paean to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. With Roe’s death there are only a few left, Carl Erskine, Duke [...]
Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered (Free subscription) | 11/15/2008
... was–in my haste, I had passed it by. Let me give you my favorite part of that story, courtesy of Roger Kahn’s classic “ The Boys of Summer .” Roe remembered: A few times people come up to me in the winter and said, “Say, Roe. If you’re gonna go up there and play with those colored boys, to hell with ya.” But very few. I always said, “Well, if that’s how you feel, I considered the...
Mr. Irrelevant (Free subscription) | 11/05/2008
“By applauding Robinson, a man did not feel that he was taking a stand on school integration, or on open housing. But for an instant he had accepted Robinson simply as a hometown ball player. To disregard color, even for an instant, is to step away from the old prejudices, the old hatred. That is not a path on which many double back.” — Roger Kahn, ‘The Boys of Summer’
