Last Days of Summer
by Steve Kluger

Our Price: $41.98
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Last Days of Summer

Book Review: I never laughed - and cried - so hard reading the same book
Summary: 5 Stars

Laughing around the ache left by his absent dad is one of the many ways Joey deals with his loneliness. Joey also seeks surrogate heroes by writing fan letters to politicians, celebrities and famous athletes ... and eventually stumbles upon NY Giants 3rd Baseman Charlie Banks. Joey tries to persuade him to hit a home run for him (and tell everyone on the radio that it's for "My best friend Joey Margolis") by inventing a different pathetic scenario with every fan letter he writes:

I am a 12-year-old boy and I am blind ...

I am a 12-year-old boy and I am dying of an incurable disease. A horrible one...

I am a 12-year-old boy and I have just enlisted as a drummer in the marine corpse...

Eventually the 24-year-old ballplayer and the rambunctious kid lock horns, leading them through a maze of encounters that finds Charlie at Joey's Bar-Mitzvah, finds Joey on the road as Batboy with Charlie's team, and finds the both of them embroiled in a relationship so delightful to read I finished the book in one day.

The prose, in the form of letters, report cards, telegrams, etc. gives you an authentic slice of life in pre-WWII Brooklyn, while causing you to laugh with the turning of each page... and to cry when you least expect it.

If you've ever been a child in need of hero, you won't just read this book ... you'll fall in love with it.

Summary of Last Days of Summer

The place is Brooklyn, the time is the early '40s, and young baseball fanatic Joey needs a hero badly in his life. How that hero becomes Charlie--and ultimately Joey himself--forms the dimensions of the novel's field, but it's the way the game is played that's so remarkable. The story's told not through conventional narrative but by way of Joey's abstract scrapbook: letters, postcards, news clippings, box scores, report cards, matchbook covers, dispatches from FDR, telegrams, even an invitation to Joey's own Bar Mitzvah and the gift list from the affair.

Delightful throughout, Summer develops a deeper traction when Charlie goes off to war, then turns poignant in its seemingly preordained aftermath. It is a triumph of style, to be sure, but a triumph of style without loss of substance. --Jeff Silverman

Historical Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical
• United States
• Comic
• Literary