Amazon.com (ISBN 0786861908, Hardcover)

Esteemed baseball writer Roger Kahn's Memories of Summer makes a fine companion to his earlier classic,The Boys of Summer. Both books plow similar soil--Kahn's roots in Brooklyn and his years covering the Dodgers with fertile prose--but the similarities end there. The new volume, subtitled "When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game," foregoes its predecessor's route of wistful melancholy and broken dreams for the exhilaration of the sport itself. Kahn focuses his considerable powers on the ways baseball permeated America's post-World War II ethos, and why, in an era less blemished by cynicism, baseball blossomed into a writer's playing field.