Rate my books

[Silver Blaze]

I just bought:

Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History by Cait N. Murphy

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947-1957 by Museum Of The City Of New York

Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero by Leigh Montville

[EdTarbusz]

I've never seen The Glory Days, that said, Crazy 08 is the best of the other three, but that book is pretty uneven. I've always found The Boys of Summer to be a dull book, and I don't like Montville's writing style.

[Los Bravos]

I've always found The Boys of Summer to be a dull bookOne of these days I'll write a long post about why I really don't like that book and find it hugely overrated.

Glory Days is a book I've been meaning to pick up. Does anybody else have a copy of Summer In The City? It covers the same era with a lot of wonderful b&w photos from the newspapers of the time.

[Captain Cold Nose]

I've never seen The Glory Days, that said, Crazy 08 is the best of the other three, but that book is pretty uneven. I've always found The Boys of Summer to be a dull book, and I don't like Montville's writing style.

I've picked it up a couple of times. Have put it down soon after and forgotten it.

[Extra Innings]

I've always found The Boys of Summer to be a dull book.

I had a chance to pick that up for a $1 at a used bookstore, but didn't for some reason. Is the writing style too blah or something?

[parlo]

In my opinion, THE BOYS OF SUMMER has not aged very well.
I think timing had a lot to do with its popularity. It came out right as the nostalgia for the 1950s was taking off in the early 1970s.
Robinson and Hodges had both recently passed away. New York was also in the midst of its 20 year decline that began coincidentally around the time the Dodgers left. The book was also the best available in the 1970s about the Dodgers. Now there are books by everyone from Duke Snider to Doris Kearns Goodwin, to Tom Oliphant.
And I think baseball books like Summer Of '49 have raised the bar.

One good Dodger book I read last year was THE LAST GOOD SEASON by Robert Shapiro.

[EdTarbusz]

I looked through Glory Days at the bookstore, Brooklyn fans probably won't appreciate Fresco Thompson's comments about Brooklyn in the mid 50s.

[Nathan M. Corzine]

Crazy '08 suffers for its author's maddening writing style, heavy (and repetitive) with period jargon, and her curiously affected tense usage. She mixes present and past tense to give the reader the sense of being "there", but it just caused me to develop a twitch. My own writing won't win any awards, but I thought an editor really should have taken Ms. Murphy in hand on that count.

I've read it several times, as noted elsewhere around here, and really want to love the book. I think it has a great, ambitious, premise and, occasionally, is quite a good book, but the overall affect, for me, is one of disappointment. More than "pretty uneven," I'd say it is extaordinarily uneven.

As for the other books, I've only briefly perused Glory Days. I like Boys of Summer for the most part, but wouldn't disagree with the assertation that it is somewhat dull, or that time has not been kind to it. I definitely struggled to get through most of Roger Kahn's other works. Leigh Montville's writing doesn't bother me that much, but he strikes me as something of the baseball writing version of contemporary Hollywood directors who like to remake old classics. He doesn't necessarily botch the job, and maybe there is some nice sheen added, but I'm always left wondering if there was a really good reason to write the new books?

I actually thought Ted Williams was kind of forgettable. I liked Ed Linn's biography, Hitter, a little bit more. Similarly, I thought The Big Bam was OK, but still mostly forgettable, and would still head for Creamer's Babe: The Legend Comes to Life when in need of a Ruth biography.

[Los Bravos]

Full scale biographies weren't his thing, but I regret that David Halberstam never wrote one of Ted. He obviously liked him and wrote well and movingly about him in a couple of different books. I think he might have been the guy to really capture some of Williams' outsize personality and greatness.

[Michael Green]

Someone once said that the only guy who could have played Ted Williams in a movie was John Wayne.

Ed, I am curious about "The Boys of Summer" because I read it and loved it, but as the years go by, I love it less. I think part of the problem is that the chapters on the players tend to be very good when they are talking. But my problem is what lawyers would call ex post facto. In subsequent books and in TV appearances, Roger Kahn has shown a massive ego and unwillingness to listen to anyone else's point of view, and the tendency to suddenly elaborate or change his story a bit. Then I go back to "The Boys of Summer" and see too much of him in it.

Terrence Smith, Red Smith's son, said that his father used to say that the writer should get something of "himself" into the story--his style or a visual detail that puts the reader right there. Kahn seems to think he is more crucial to the story than he is.

Thus endeth my two cents.

[ACrank]

One of these days I'll write a long post about why I really don't like that book and find it hugely overrated.

Glory Days is a book I've been meaning to pick up. Does anybody else have a copy of Summer In The City? It covers the same era with a lot of wonderful b&w photos from the newspapers of the time.

I'd be curious to read that myself - i loved "Boys Of Summer" when i was in high school (& recently found my dog eared cover missing copy of it) but can't remember reading it since - been tempted to reread it just to see what my reaction to it would be now.

I have to admit I enjoyed "Crazy 08" but i think that was more because of the topic of the book and not necessarily the writing style.

[Los Bravos]

Someone once said that the only guy who could have played Ted Williams in a movie was John Wayne.I kind of prefer Peter Gammons' view of it, that Ted Williams was the real life embodiment of those characters that Wayne always played.
Then I go back to "The Boys of Summer" and see too much of him in it.

Terrence Smith, Red Smith's son, said that his father used to say that the writer should get something of "himself" into the story--his style or a visual detail that puts the reader right there. Kahn seems to think he is more crucial to the story than he is.That is a major, major part of it. It's far more of a personal memoir of a guy who happened to be covering the Dodgers for a time than it is the definitive account of the team's glory era that it's often made out to be.

It's unfair to be critical of Kahn's book solely because it wasn't what I thought it would be, but even accepting what it is (the aforementioned autobiographical sketch and the subsequent update of the players and their later lives), it's still marred by a maudlin, self important and now dated writing style that obscures far more than it illuminates.
I'd be curious to read that myself - i loved "Boys Of Summer" when i was in high school (& recently found my dog eared cover missing copy of it) but can't remember reading it since - been tempted to reread it just to see what my reaction to it would be now.I broke out my copy last year while looking for a few Robinson-Durocher anecdotes and found that a few of those and some of his other turns of phrase (the thing about Babe Herman being an outfielder "who occasionally intercepted a ball with his head" for one) had stuck in my mind, so it wasn't a totally wasted experience (I read it first when I was @ 14), but my initial impression wasn't satisfying and I haven't changed my mind substantially over the years.

[Michael Green]

Los Bravos, I won't argue with you and I ESPECIALLY won't argue with Peter Gammons. It's a good description. The other thing I always loved about Williams is that as the years went by, all these stories came out about what a big softie he actually was, but he so hated and suffered from the Boston media that he just wouldn't show it.

This digresses a little further, and I apologize for it, but since we are talking about writing, I still think the greatest thing John Updike ever wrote was his essay on Teddy Ballgame's last game. Great reporting, great writing.

As to The Boys of Summer, I don't mind that a lot of it is autobiographical--it makes a great story that a 25-year-old was covering one of the two greatest baseball teams of the era. It's just that more recently, Kahn has revealed some bitterness and ego, and it tends to cheapen what he did write so well.

[JRJohnson6]

Parlo: Great insight to why I may not have liked "Boys of Summer"

I am probably part of a rare breed of people who actually read "October Men" (also by Roger Kahn) before I read "Boys of Summer". I really enjoyed "October Men" and was very excited about "Boys of Summer". I've seen/read many list that rank it as the top baseball book of all time. I can think of 10-15 baseball books off the top of my head that I have read and enjoyed much more than I enjoyed "BOS". I just got tired of reading about the inner workings of a newspaper. Kahn's belief that he has to include every single back story before actually telling a story was very borrisome. I found myself feeling as if I was back in college reading a text book that my professor swore was a masterpiece while I wondered what the point of reading was. Terrible book.