Judged on its own nostalgic terms, The Boys of Summer is a glorious recollection, recalling for us the spurious perfection of Brooklyn in the 1940s and early 1950s, its Brooklyn Eagle, which screamed joyously in a six-column spread in 1941, "WE WIN!" after the team won its first pennant in twenty-one years. Brown v. Topeka was far away in some state that couldn't even field a major league team; Joe McCarthy's extravaganzas had little impact on our schoolboy parochialism. What had it all to do with the collective fellowship we belonged to, with identifying with the "national game?" I suppose our instinct for survival encouraged those voyeuristic fantasies; but, at the same time, love of baseball, really the Dodgers, mattered very much.

I remember my friend Chick who, while his mother wept in terror after he had received his induction notice in 1951, was too frantic about the Giants catching...