Beyond the Boys of Summer

"Roger Kahn has spun everyday sports stories into gilded literature."

—San Diego Union Tribune

"Kahn’s fly-on-the-wall style brings to life players most of us knew only from their bubblegum cards."

—Dallas Morning News

From the greatest sportswriter of his generation, Beyond the Boys of Summer features the best of Roger Kahn’s newspaper and magazine work, plus selected excerpts from his celebrated books.

From the beginning of his career, as a young man reporting on sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Roger Kahn labored to create literature. After painstaking research and observation, he would sit down at his desk and "write like hell," working to turn everyday events into art. For the next fifty years, he never stopped.

Today, Roger Kahn is arguably the greatest sportswriter of his generation. Most famous for his modern classic, The Boys of Summer--hailed by James Michener as "the finest American book on sports"--Kahn is the author of eighteen books and the only baseball writer to have had three titles on the New York Times bestseller list. While he is best known for his "sweet ear" for America's national pastime, Kahn did not limit himself to baseball. With his literary style of reportage, he explored the depths of basketball and boxing, Judaism and McCarthyism, and even poetry in an unforgettable interview with one of his heroes, Robert Frost.

For the first time, Beyond the Boys of Summer presents a showcase of fifty years' worth of Kahn's celebrated work. Uniquely organized around life's stages--from youth to old age--the book brings you face-to-face with some of the greatest names in sports, including Muhammad Ali, Jack Dempsey, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Willie Mays, and Pete Rose. Beyond sports, Kahn takes you back to the tumultuous days of 1968 to witness the violent protest of a student rebellion. He brings you to a bar mitzvah for a hilarious and controversial look at the Jewish ceremony. And he invites you for a quiet walk through the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn, where his father instilled in him an undying love for baseball. Harking back to a time when newspaper writing was an art form and Roger Kahn was one of its most accomplished masters, Beyond the Boys of Summer is nothing less than a literary accomplishment of the highest order.

Library Journal

There may be no greater sports book than The Boys of Summer, Kahn's lauded memoir of the Jackie Robinson-era Dodgers, but down the years he has also written superbly about his ownership of a minor league team, the "head game" of pitching, the stormy miracle of the '78 Yankee season, the Columbia sit-ins, the poet Robert Frost, and Jack Dempsey. This eloquent and incisive anthology from Kahn is for all baseball collections. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Roger Kahn is the author of the 1972 classic The

Boys of Summer, which Sports Illustrated named the best baseball book of

all time.

Rob Miraldi is a professor of journalism at

the State University of New York at New Paltz.