"Baseball's inherent rhythm, minutes and minutes of passivity erupting into seconds of frenzied action, matches an attribute of the American character," Kahn writes in A Season in the Sun.

A better book—such as his earlier The Boys of Summer, a nostalgic, moving account of the diaspora of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the mid-1950s—might lend greater weight to his thesis, if only because it showed how that rhythm worked its way into the lives of men who played the game. But A Season in the Sun, however engaging, is too loose and rambling, too much a rework of a series of articles Kahn executed for Sports Illustrated, too overladen with his own wives and family to be that book.

What sticks from Kahn's book is what sticks from nearly all baseball accounts—the anecdotes: Early Wynn throwing a bean-ball at his own son, Minnie Minoso lining...