In this engaging memoir, Kahn (The Boys of Summer
) looks back at baseball and much more as he presents his episodic reminiscences as free-form essays arranged loosely around iconic figures from his past. In a profile of New York Herald Tribune
sports editor R. Stanley Woodward, entitled "The Coach," Kahn elegizes the great postwar newsroom culture of the paper, where he learned to structure a narrative and slip in Milton references. He probes the epochal subject of racism in baseball through homages to integrationist hero Jackie Robinson and his teammate Pee Wee Reese, a white Southerner who literally embraced him. He evokes the 1960s in a kaleidoscopic essay that ranges from a thumbnail sketch of a washed-up Mickey Rooney to impressions of the Goldwater and McCarthy presidential campaigns. A regretful piece on his son's suicide recalls the crazy therapeutic culture of the "Me" decade, while getting off a few terse words about his ex-wife. Kahn has a graceful, personal style, full of deftly evoked color and characters, with a bit of the newspaperman's hard-bitten swagger and a two-fisted liberalism one doesn't see much anymore. Photos not seen by PW
. (June)
