Reviews

The Summer Game by Roger Angell

brettwooley's review

funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective slow-paced

5.0

isloc's review

informative reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.0

Beautifully written reporting and musing on Baseball. Best read in sections as it is quite repetitive in content, but the writing is beautiful and often funny.

valhecka's review

funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Virtuosic writing.

---

Content Warnings

Moderate: Racial slurs

writesdave's review

emotional informative lighthearted reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.0

Fun stroll through a golden era of baseball with the golden prose of Roger Angell as our guide. It was fascinating to read about the machinations of expansion through a 2022 lens. Indeed, Angell takes on baseball as Galeano wrote soccer—a fan with no real rooting interest, just a fiend for a good game. Enjoyable for any baseball fan.

notevenhalf's review against another edition

informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

fun and interesting to read coming from a baseball fan who likes the mets, little details of games, and sometimes sappy musings on baseball. the last essay made me cry a little bit. like the other reviewers have described, there is a lot of play by play which can be a little slow to get through/confusing, and it would’ve been nice to see more exploration of the social/political issues that were often only touched on lightly.

jfranco77's review

3.0

This book is a collection of essays written by Angell in the 60s and early 70s. He focuses mostly on playoffs and world series, but there's also some discussion about the labor and racial strife that plagued the game during this time, and some coverage of the regular season and the "future of the game." There's a lot of Mets coverage, as Angell was both a fan and frequent commenter on the team from their inception.

I really wanted to like this book more. I'm a huge baseball fan and this wasn't an era where I knew a lot of the details beyond the end of season results. Some of the essays were brilliant, and I definitely learned a lot. It was just a slog to get through it at times.

bstratton's review

2.0

A more fitting title might have been, "Breezy Musings Of a Baseball Dilettante." Maybe there's an audience out there who craves play-by-play accounts of 50-year old baseball games, with virtually no reflection on the larger societal issues impacting the game at the time. But I wasn't it.

johnnygamble's review

4.0

sometimes great, sometimes good. loved the contemporary view of a changing game, wished there was more about the changes, and personalities, less about the play by play.

justlcruz's review

3.0

An amazing read that shares Angell's talent for taking baseball and making it into a literary work of art. Also, this volume shares the transition of baseball from an event you had to experience in person or on the radio into the spectacle you can be entertained at the ballpark without even watching the game or watch on prime time TV.