Any baseball book that begins with a quotation from Dylan Thomas can't be all good. But then, ["The Boys of Summer"] is about a team so extraordinary that Marianne Moore wrote poems to it, so perhaps Roger Kahn's pretentiousness is not entirely out of place. The "boys of summer" were named [Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Andy Pafko, Billy Cox and Carl "Skoonj" Furillo]. They were the starting lineup of the best team the majors ever saw—the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950's.

As Kahn makes clear, they were remarkable both for the depths of their personalities and for the range of their skills. Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider took turns hitting 40 home runs a season. Hodges, Billy Cox and Carl Furillo were acknowledged as the finest glove men of their day. Jackie Robinson taught a new generation how...