Few authors have achieved as many levels of success as has Roger Kahn. When his New York Herald Tribune salary reached $10,000 a year in 1955, he was the highest-paid and most-sought-after baseball writer in the city. Turning to freelance magazine writing, he won five Best Sports Stories prizes between 1960 and 1982. A "serious" book, The Passionate People: What It Means to Be a Jew in America (1968), was published as Kahn turned forty. Kahn has published eleven books--two of them novels--since then, including the landmark The Boys of Summer (1972), which contrasted the young, diverse, talented Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s with their middle-aged selves facing personal agonies twenty years later; A Season in the Sun (1977); Good Enough to Dream (1985); and The Era: 1947-1957, When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (1993). Though he has also written about the 1968 Columbia University student protests, the poet Robert Frost, the violinist...