The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
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Overview
Growing Up In A Doomed Hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball, and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.
Synopsis
Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball, and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.
The Washington Post - Bruce Schoenfeld
…a painfully evocative memoir of a joyless youth in New Haven, Conn.…the crackle of Dawidoff's writing and his unstinting, if occasionally overbearing, sensitivity make his unfortunate journey compelling.
Editorials
Bruce Schoenfeld
…a painfully evocative memoir of a joyless youth in New Haven, Conn.…the crackle of Dawidoff's writing and his unstinting, if occasionally overbearing, sensitivity make his unfortunate journey compelling.—The Washington Post
Sam Stephenson
Nicholas Dawidoff's memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy, is a successor to [Russell Baker's] Growing Up, and it deserves as much attention. Dawidoff, at 45, is a generation younger than Baker (he was 19 when the 57-year-old Baker came out with his book in 1982), and his story is more complicated, involving not his father's death but something perhaps more insidious, mental illness. The book grew out of Dawidoff's New Yorker magazine article, "My Father's Troubles," published in 2000, and he expands the father-son focus into a beautiful portrait of a wounded family…The voice in The Crowd Sounds Happy is inquisitive and graceful while sparing no pain, and it makes one wish Dawidoff had a broader platform, like Russell Baker's old New York Times column.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
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.Library Journal
Dawidoff offers a superbly written elegiac memoir combining a child's love of baseball with an emerging understanding of the role mental illness plays in destroying love, life, and simple pleasures, notably radio broadcasts of Red Sox games serving to induce sleep as a fan's joy deflects the fears of childhood. Essential reading for anyone who wishes a balm for heartbreaks in youth, torn family life, love, and seventh-game losses.
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.