Memories of Summer

A story so good you'd believe it was fiction.

Let me explain this way: Growing up, I was never a fan of the Dodgers, they were my Giants' rival. This book made me a fan. In fact, this book made me long to be the kind of fan Khan was, want to be a roadie for a team I barely knew of beyond a few big names a week before. It revived my slumped interest in baseball overall, and taught me a lot that I had never considered about the sport.

There's not one place in this book where names and stats are thrown at the reader; every name and every statistic is a story, some seen from the wide eyes of a child and some with the reverence of an adult around his human heroes. Neither is this book a whitewash nor the disillusionment of heroes not living up to their image: Everyone is alive and fresh, everyone has a meticulously researched backstory told with a folksy sense of humor about their all-too-human foibles. Mixed into the stories are comments from the people involved from interviews many years later, when they can look back with more honesty, written in seamlessly. Of course not everyone's stories match - instead of choosing a truth, Khan just lays a few sides out, lets the reader feel some of the disharmony that occasionally shook the teams, without stopping to exhaustively debate the reality of each.

It's very obvious that Khan is an astute master of language, someone who spent fifty years not only writing stories daily but perfecting his craft. The emotion he pours into every page never comes off tacky or trite, it's manly but not chauvinistic, and filled with a lifelong boyish wonder. Most of all, the retelling of each game is something special, breathing life back into an afternoon decades past. He manages to create an incredibly visceral picture of the highs and lows, tossing in more stories to bridge the plays, and inspires plenty of envy. It never gets old, and no technique is overused enough or story long enough to grate.

The book certainly shifts dramatically with the move away from Brooklyn, slows down a bit and comes back to earth as it accelerates through the years, but I never lost interest in it. I wish this book hadn't been stolen from me; someday I'll find it again and finish the last few chapters. I really do want to hear the last word - and then pass it on to another Dodger fan who just doesn't know it yet.