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The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
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The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
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by Nicholas Dawidoff
Sales Rank : 198069
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Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition May 6, 2008
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375400281
ISBN-13: 978-0375400285
Product Dimensions:
9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dawidoff (The Fly Swatter) brilliantly takes the reader through his journey of childhood struggles in this moving memoir. Uprooted from Washington, D.C., at the age of three, Dawidoff moved north with his sister, Sally, and mother to begin a new life in New Haven, Conn. There, the author reveals the beginning of his love affair with baseball, first with the New York Mets before changing his allegiance to the Boston Red Sox. The national pastime provided Dawidoff some of his happiest moments growing up, amid a world of pain—most of which evolved from his father's debilitating mental illness that made weekend visits to Manhattan unbearable as he grew older. Other struggles from his boyhood—from the typical adolescent bullying and first experiences with love to the devastating death of his beloved Aunt Susi—are told in vivid and heartbreaking detail. Simultaneously, Dawidoff paints a picture of his remarkable mother, who selflessly provided for him and his sister. It's the Red Sox—baseball's then longtime losers—that provide Dawidoff the most happiness, because of the parallels he draws with his own life: I was grateful to the Red Sox for taking me out of myself, giving me something to anticipate, for not being too happy themselves. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Review
"The Crowd Sounds Happy vividly captures the crosscurrents of a childhood at once unusually happy and unusually haunted. Dawidoff writes like an angel, and his memoir bids fair to join Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life on the short shelf of great books about American boyhood."
--Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
"This beautiful book is like a sharp knife--painful, gleaming and utterly precise."
--Joan Acocella, author of Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints
"A tender, exquisitely observed recollection of childhood, a failed and hurtful father, and hope."
--Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
"A father-son-baseball story like no other. Dawidoff limns the double life of adolescence so acutely that I found myself wincing at least once a paragraph. I devoured and savored this beautifully written book, even as it broke my heart."
--George Howe Colt, author of The Big House
"I've never read a memoir whose author has remained truer to his boyhood self. The young Dawidoff who loved Ted Williams, Elvis Costello, and Samuel Johnson has grown up to write like an original amalgam of all three, and the result is an intricately recollected, uncommonly frank self-portrait with something terrific on page after page."
--Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections
From the Hardcover edition.
--This text refers to the
Kindle Edition
edition.
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