A Boy S Summer

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.

From the creators of GOSSIP GIRL comes a fresh, edgy take on teenage romance. Three interconnected stories explore the different stages of love over the course of one summer on the seashore.It's summer. It's hot. And it's time to hook up.Cousins Ella, Beth, and Jamie are at their family's beach house, and they're gearing up for the wildest time of their lives. Sassy Ella is majorly crushing on a cute older boy -- who just happens to be her sister's new boyfriend. Meanwhile, practical Beth is surprised when she finds herself falling for her best friend George. And shy, creative Jamie gets her heart broken when her summer love abandons her. Three girls, too many boys, and some seriously stormy romances...it all adds up to one unforgettable summer.

Both a haunting coming-of-age story set in North Texas against the backdrop of a deadly tornado, and a character-driven, deeply-affecting supernatural thriller. In 1979, a massive tornado devastates the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, leaving scores dead, thousands homeless, and nine-year-old Todd Willis in a coma, fighting for his life. Four years later, Todd awakens to a world that looks the same but feels different in a way he can't quite grasp. For Todd, it's a struggle to separate fact from fiction as he battles lingering hallucinations from his long sleep. The new friends Todd makes in 1983 are fascinated with his experience and become mesmerized by his strange relationship with the world. Together the five boys come of age during a dark, fiery summer where they find first love, betrayal, and a secret so terrible they agree to never speak of it again. But darkness returns to Wichita Falls twenty-five years later, and the boys--now men--are forced to reunite and confront the wounds from their past. When their memories of that childhood summer refuse to align with reality, the friends embark upon a search for truth that will threaten their lives, and transform their understanding of each other--and the world itself--forever.

Gerry Spence, father to six, grandfather to ten, is a man who knows intimately the joys of fatherhood and who writes beautifully and lyrically about how fatherhood allows a man to rediscover the boy within himself, while simultaneously assuming true adult responsibility for the first time. This is a man who truly understands boys and how boys grow up to become men. No school teaches us how to become successful human beings; there are no classes to teach boys how to become decent adult men. Boys grow up by imitating their father-if, that is, the father spends enough time with his son. A Boy's Summer is a book of short essays describing activities, adventures and experiments that fathers and sons can do together. These projects take from an hour to an afternoon to a weekend-time that a father and son can spend together discovering themselves and the world around them Illustrated with forty-five line drawings by Tom Spence, A Boy's Summer is written so it can be read by father to son or by son to father. "This book is for boys who, with their fathers, will share those precious moments that create the stuff of a lifetime from which successful sons, and because of it, successful fathers, are made."

Twenty Days. Twenty Boys. One chance to find love. According to her best friend Frankie, twenty days in ZanzibarBay is the perfect opportunity to have a summer fling, and if they meet one boy every day, there's a pretty good chance Anna will find her first summer romance. Anna lightheartedly agrees to the game, but there's something she hasn't told Frankie---she's already had that kind of romance, and it was with Frankie's older brother, Matt, just before his tragic death one year ago. Beautifully written and emotionally honest, this is a debut novel that explores what it truly means to love someone and what it means to grieve, and ultimately, how to make the most of every single moment this world has to offer.

Twelve-year-old best friends and relatives, Julia and Eliza are happy to spend the summer together while Julia's mother is serving in the National Guard in Iraq but when they meet a neighborhood boy, their close relationship begins to change.

It seemed only natural to nickname them the ‘Onslow Boys’. Every time they swaggered in the front door of the Onslow Hotel after a hard week’s work, their laughter was loud and genuine as they settled onto their bar stools. I peeked through the restaurant partition, a flimsy divider between my world and theirs. I couldn’t help but smile whenever I saw them, saw him... Toby Morrison. Quiet seventeen-year-old Tess doesn’t relish the thought of a summertime job. She wants nothing more than to forget the past haunts of high school and have fun with her best friends before the dreaded Year Twelve begins. To Tess, summer is when everything happens: riding bikes down to the lake, watching the fireworks at the Onslow Show and water bomb fights at the sweltering Sunday markets. How did she let her friends talk her into working? After first-shift disasters, rude, wealthy tourists and a taunting ex-boyfriend, Tess is convinced nothing good can come of working her summer away. However, Tess finds unlikely allies in a group of locals dubbed ‘The Onslow Boys’, who are old enough to drive cars, drink beer and not worry about curfews. Tess’s summer of working expands her world with a series of first times with new friends, forbidden love and heartbreaking chaos. All with the one boy she has never been able to forget. It will be a summer she will always remember. Warning: sexual references, and occasional coarse language. The Summer Series: Book 1: The Boys of Summer Book 1.5: Stan (Novella) Book 2: An Endless Summer Book 2.5: Max (Novella) Book 3: That One Summer Book 3.5: Ringer (Novella) Book 4: Forever Summer Authors Note: While each title can be read as a stand-alone story, you will likely enjoy taking the journey with these characters from the beginning.

Acclaimed baseball writer Roger Kahn gives us a memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, a recollection of a life in journalism, and a record of personal acquaintance with the greatest ballplayers of several eras. His father had a passion for the Dodgers; his mother?s passion was for poetry. Somehow, young Roger managed to blend both loves in a career that encompassed writing about sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Time. Kahn recalls the great personalities of a golden era?Leo Durocher, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Red Smith, Dick Young, and many more?and recollects the wittiest lines from forty years in dugouts, press boxes, and newsrooms. Often hilarious, always precise about action on the field and off, Memories of Summer is an enduring classic about how baseball met literature to the benefit of both.