Lest we forget: Roger Kahn

February 7, 2020

The writer Roger Kahn in 1990. In his baseball books, he often entwined memories of his Brooklyn boyhood and his coming-of-age as a journalist with tales from the clubhouse, the barroom and the diamond.The author of The Boys of Summer and almost 20 other books died yesterday at the age of 92. Here’s his obituary from The New York Times by Bruce Weber. You know he will be the topic of numerous tributes from sport and literary outlets in the days to come. Here are just a couple:

I came along a bit too late to enjoy the Dodgers when they were in Brooklyn, so the nostalgia of his seminal work didn’t really apply to me, but I appreciated the impact it had on boomers slightly older than I. The chance to relive the glory (and not so glorious) days is special to that demographic and TBOS opened the door for books that came later such as Wait Till Next Year – A Memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, by Thomas Oliphant. (I have not had the chance to speak with Ms. Goodwin about her work, but I did chat with Mr. Oliphant.)

Kahn is also one of those authors I would have loved to have on for a Bookshelf Conversation but I was too intimidated.

To be honest, TBOS wasn’t even my favorite work by Kahn. That nod goes to Good Enough to Dream, his short-lived experience as the owner”of the low minor league Utica Blue Sox. Perhaps it was because his young daughter was a big part of the story, it was something I related to more than his most famous oeuvre.

Mr. Kahn’s 1972 look back at the Dodgers of the 1950s is as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years.

 

 

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