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A review by eely225
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
5.0
"... as with an under-boiled potato, O'Malley's warmth was mostly external." -Roger Kahn
The flairs are literary and they are incisive. They are morally charged and they are nostalgic. The asides make the book because the plot doesn't matter. There are one hundred pages of plot, one hundred pages of baseball history and championships and striving. And then we see that the real lives, even the ones lived amidst that strife, were asides and flairs and intangibles.
The title is so misleading. I avoided this book for a long time because it seemed like it would merely bask in the nostalgic glow of long gone halcyon days. The Brooklyn Dodgers, that small thing uprooted and transformed into the picture of capital-centric glitz, tend to take on the hue of a baseball martyr. So I hesitated and demurred.
The title is there for a reason though. Kahn, having seen the reality of the team from the front row, knew well enough that he could value the importance of the team without making it something that it isn't. So he does his best to say what it was for him, and then he lets its central cast say what it was for them too. No one here is presented as a god incarnate, just as people thrust into a unique circumstance together and trying to make sense of it apart.
The story of Jackie Robinson tends to fit into history texts as a heroic but inevitable token of progress. It wasn't so simple for the people who made it happen, and hearing how they rationalize the experience in retrospect makes it all much more human. They can still be heroes without being gods.
It's the story of burdened men and how they handle their burdens. The burden of success and subsequent feelings of inadequacy. The burden of Vietnam, a colossal conflict dwarfing their own and scooping up their sons. The burden of having overperformed and being underpaid. The burden of living in a tumultuous time and trying to explain that they lived through tumult too, that even though it looks like nothing in retrospect, it was something. It was real. Deteriorating bodies and deteriorating respect. This is a picture of transitional moments, not yet far enough removed from glories for it to be history. Just folks.
The flairs are literary and they are incisive. They are morally charged and they are nostalgic. The asides make the book because the plot doesn't matter. There are one hundred pages of plot, one hundred pages of baseball history and championships and striving. And then we see that the real lives, even the ones lived amidst that strife, were asides and flairs and intangibles.
The title is so misleading. I avoided this book for a long time because it seemed like it would merely bask in the nostalgic glow of long gone halcyon days. The Brooklyn Dodgers, that small thing uprooted and transformed into the picture of capital-centric glitz, tend to take on the hue of a baseball martyr. So I hesitated and demurred.
The title is there for a reason though. Kahn, having seen the reality of the team from the front row, knew well enough that he could value the importance of the team without making it something that it isn't. So he does his best to say what it was for him, and then he lets its central cast say what it was for them too. No one here is presented as a god incarnate, just as people thrust into a unique circumstance together and trying to make sense of it apart.
The story of Jackie Robinson tends to fit into history texts as a heroic but inevitable token of progress. It wasn't so simple for the people who made it happen, and hearing how they rationalize the experience in retrospect makes it all much more human. They can still be heroes without being gods.
It's the story of burdened men and how they handle their burdens. The burden of success and subsequent feelings of inadequacy. The burden of Vietnam, a colossal conflict dwarfing their own and scooping up their sons. The burden of having overperformed and being underpaid. The burden of living in a tumultuous time and trying to explain that they lived through tumult too, that even though it looks like nothing in retrospect, it was something. It was real. Deteriorating bodies and deteriorating respect. This is a picture of transitional moments, not yet far enough removed from glories for it to be history. Just folks.