Another Good Non-fiction Book To Read

Another Good Non-fiction Book To Read

Spring is the beginning of baseball season and I decided to read Roger Kahn's book, The Boys of Summer which as the cover states is "the classic narrative of growing up within shouting distance of Ebbets Field, covering the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, and what's happened to everybody since." I knew I would like this book as soon as I looked at the index. Here were the names of a lot of the ball players my three brothers, Paul, Carl and Harold would talk about with my father in the fifties and sixties: Red Barber, Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio, Leo Durocher, Gil Hodges, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Pee Wee Reese, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and Casey Stengel. Just reading these names brings back memories of baseball games behind our house on the farm.

This book includes in most chapters an interesting quote. Here's one Roger Kahn used for the end of the Interlude between Book I and Book II that i really like:

Did I ever dream

I should pass this way again

As an old man?

I have lived such a long time---

Nakayama of the Night.

written by Saigyo in Japan over 1000 years ago

Of course the book's title, The Boys of Summer, comes from the writing of Dylan Thomas:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils.