Roger Kahn - Böcker

"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.

Roger Kahn's first major league hit was a grand slam: The Boys of Summer, his runaway bestseller that immortalized the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Now Kahn does the same for players whose moment in the sun has not yet arrived. Good Enough to Dream is the story of his year as owner of the Class A, very minor league Utica Blue Sox. Most of the Blue Sox will never make it to the majors, but they all share the dream that links the small child in the sandlot with the bonus baby who has just smacked one out of the stadium. It's a dream Kahn learned from his father and, in the course of a season, passes on to his daughter—hours of practice for a moment of poetry; a hard living but a touch of legend. Good Enough to Dream presents baseball unadorned, a game still sweet enough to lure grown men to leagues where first-class transportation is an old school bus and the infield is likely to be the consistency of thick soup. It is a funny and poignant story of one season and one special team that will make us hesitate before we ever call anything "bush league" again.

In 1976 Roger Kahn spent an entire baseball season, from spring training through the World Series, with players of every stripe and competence. The result is this book, in which Kahn reports on a small college team's successes and hopes, a young New England ball club, a failing major league franchise, and a group of heroes on the national stage.

Celebrated sports writer Roger Kahn casts his gaze on the golden age of baseball, an unforgettable time when the game thrived as America's unrivaled national sport. The Era begins in 1947 with Jackie Robinson changing major league baseball forever by taking the field for the Dodgers. Dazzling, momentous events characterize the decade that followed-Robinson's amazing accomplishments; the explosion on the national scene of such soon-to-be legends as Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Bobby Thomson, Duke Snider, and Yogi Berra; Casey Stengel's crafty managing; the emergence of televised games; and the stunning success of the Yankees as they play in nine out of eleven World Series. The Era concludes with the relocation of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, a move that shook the sport to its very roots.

Acclaimed baseball writer Roger Kahn gives us a memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, a recollection of a life in journalism, and a record of personal acquaintance with the greatest ballplayers of several eras. His father had a passion for the Dodgers; his mother's passion was for poetry. Somehow, young Roger managed to blend both loves in a career that encompassed writing about sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Time. Kahn recalls the great personalities of a golden era—Leo Durocher, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Red Smith, Dick Young, and many more—and recollects the wittiest lines from forty years in dugouts, press boxes, and newsrooms. Often hilarious, always precise about action on the field and off, Memories of Summer is an enduring classic about how baseball met literature to the benefit of both.

Most famous for his classic work The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn is widely regarded as one of the greatest sportswriters of our time. The Roger Kahn Reader is a rich collection of his stories and articles that originally appeared in publications such as Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, Esquire, and the Nation.Kahn’s pieces, published between 1952 and today, present a vivid, turbulent, and intimate picture of more than half a century in American sport. His standout writings bring us close to entrepreneurs and hustlers (Walter O'Malley and Don King), athletes of Olympian gifts (Ted Williams, Stan Musial, “Le Demon Blond” Guy Lefleur), and sundry compelling issues of money, muscle, and myth. We witness Roger Maris’s ordeal by fame; Bob Gibson’s blazing competitive fire; and Red Smith, now white-haired and renowned, contemplating his beginnings and his future. Also included is a new and original chapter, “Clem,” about the author’s compelling lifelong friendship with former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Clem Labine. Written across six decades, this volume shows Kahn’s ability to describe the athletes he profiled as they truly were in a manner neither compromised nor cruel but always authentic and up close.

With a Foreword by Roger Kahn, author of the legendary baseball book The Boys of Summer, here are words of wisdom and whimsey by players, managers, writers, and sportscasters, that will entertain and educate any baseball fan.The Little Red Book of Baseball Wisdom unearths a treasury of quotes reflecting more than a century’s worth of history from our national pastime. Featuring contributions from:Hank AaronWalt WhitmanLeo DurocherTy CobbTed WilliamsYogi BerraJohn UpdikeDizzy DeanLou GehrigCasey StengelAnd many more!Novelist W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe which became the movie Field of Dreams, wrote that baseball is “a game where little gems of wisdom or whimsy can be created in the dugout, the bullpen, or the press box during long, hot afternoons and evenings of baseball.”