Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Monday, September 19, 2005
You’ll Laugh, You’ll Cry, You’ll Cheer & You’ll Thank My Brother
My brother recommended that I read Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger
, and while I generally like the same books as my brother, I honestly didn’t expect to LOVE this book so much. It’s the most amazing coming-of-age novel I’ve ever read. Since Publisher’s Weekly can describe it better than I can, here goes: From Publishers Weekly—Mixing nostalgia, baseball and a boy’s mostly epistolary friendship with a 1940s baseball star, this inventive but sentimental novel consists entirely of letters, fictional newspaper clippings, telegrams, war dispatches, report cards and other documentary fragments. Growing up Jewish in a tough, Italian Brooklyn neighborhood, Joey Margolis is troubled by anti-Semitic neighbors, by Hitler’s rising power, by his parents’ divorce and by his absent cad of a father. Craving a surrogate dad, Joey strikes up a correspondence with Wisconsin-born New York Giants slugger Charlie Banks. The boy’s outrageous fibs, tough-guy posturing and desperate pleas grab the reluctant attention of the superstar, whose racy vernacular guy-talk (peppered with amusing misspellings and misusages) hints at his deepening affection for Joey. Charlie is a politically enlightened proletarian ballplayer with a heart of gold. His liberal views find an echo in Joey, whose best friend, Japanese-American Craig Nakamura, gets shipped off with his family to a wartime internment camp. In a plot that swerves from Joey’s Bar Mitzvah to a White House meeting with President Roosevelt to a tearjerking climax, Kluger keeps changing the pace and piles on a slew of period references with a heavy hand. Despite these flaws, this debut novel is at its best a poignant, golden evocation of one boy’s lost innocence.
The “heavy hand” that Publisher’s Weekly talks about didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book at all. It’s right up there at the top of my favorite books of all time. Just the right amount of baseball, history, politics, sarcasm and heartbreaking love stories. Normally, I just tell you how much I loved a book and don’t tell you to read it, so I can talk about it with you. But...read it. If you don’t like it, you can yell at me or something.
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My husband bought that book, along with three others, for me for my birthday last winter! I loved it. He had heard about it on NPR, they were talking about some good books to help cure “SAD”...(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4224217)
on 09/21 at 07:43 AM
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I just can’t believe how much I liked this book. I generally have absolutely no desire to reread any books, but I want to read this book again. I bought “Almost Like Being In Love” just because I wanted more Steve Kluger.
on 09/23 at 07:47 PM
