Before a ballplayer's salary resembled a Pentagon budget, before a doubleheader was something brokered between lawyers and publicists, there was the gilded era of baseball, the era of Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, and Mickey Mantle. Roger Kahn, the acclaimed baseball writer, the true poet laureate of the game whose classic The Boys of Summer is universally hailed as the best baseball book ever written, lived and breathed the game in those days. In Memories of Summer Kahn recalls growing up within earshot of Ebbets Field and thriving on the pieces of baseball wisdom passed on to him from his father; and later as a journalist, spending his afternoons and evenings at the ballparks, his nights laughing and drinking with the ballplayers, without a publicist in sight.At once an intensely private memoir and the chronicle of the lives of some of America's most beloved public figures and institutions, Memories of Summer is the story of an era told through one man's experiences. It is a literate and compelling encounter with the game in its youth and the young men who played it or dreamed of playing it; like baseball itself it is personal and transcendent, and interleaved with young, extravagant dreams.