The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball | 
 enlarge | Author: Nicholas Dawidoff
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $5.75
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 50816
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0375400281
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.449796092
EAN: 9780375400285
ASIN: 0375400281
Publication Date: May 6, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere--and how baseball helps him find his place in America.
The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball--the inner game as it has never been described before.
The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 A Beautifully Written, Painfully Honest Memoir November 15, 2008
Nicholas Dawidoff's memoir of his childhood, "The Crowd Sounds Happy," is a painfully beautiful recreation of his inner and outer worlds as a youngster. The subtitle, "A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball," neatly captures the book's three principal themes. Dawidoff grew up the child of a single mother in New Haven, Connecticut. His parents divorced when he was young, and it was many years before he became aware that the father he only saw on weekend visits and family get-togethers was mentally ill. His mother, a teacher, labored ceaselessly to fill the material and spiritual gaps in her son's life. Though her love for her son and daughter is clear, her presence seems too intense at times. Young Nicholas found his escapes in the life of the mind, the classroom, and in the athletic life, baseball.
One of Dawidoff's previous books is a biography of Moe Berg, a major league baseball player of the 1920s and 1930s, who was also a scholar, fluent in a number of languages, and a sometimes spy. The parallels between Berg's story and Dawidoff's are inexact, but intriguing, and this book may offer clues to his interest in Berg. Like Berg, Dawidoff inhabited multiple worlds, guarded his secrets, and often found himself uncomfortable with his contemporaries. Both found escape in baseball; for Dawidoff it was not only his joy in playing the game, but in studying its history, and rooting for his beloved Boston Red Sox, who seemed to eternally come up short every fall.
Dawidoff writes with great clarity and honesty. His story is often uncomfortable to share, but is beautifully and compellingly told.--William C. Hall
Saved by the Red Sox July 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Growing up in lower middle-class household led by a frugal and severe mother, haunted by his absent and mentally ill father, Nick Dawidoff turned to the Boston Red Sox as his beacon of hope and guiding light and baseball as his true love. Loathing the Yankees not only because they were the Sox's eternal enemies, but also because they represented everything horrible in his life--he had to visit a seedy part of New York monthly in his dreaded visits to his father--Nick managed to wend his way through a difficult and untutored childhood, ultimately attending and graduating from Harvard and becoming a fine writer.
This is an inspirational book of childhood angst, love, torment, and baseball.
 Powerful! June 21, 2008
The Crowd Sounds Happy is an eloquent autobiography written with keen awareness and insight by someone that has survived and understood Severe Mental Disorders (SMD) in a parent. Laced with periods of happiness, the disturbing story describes the periodic psychoses of the author's father that required his family to flee when Nicky was a toddler. Resulting family anxieties haunted his obstacle-filled youth.
Nicky's forced visitations with an explosive, dangerous parent throughout his youth are devastating to witness. More devastating is his frugal, frustrated mother, cursing him as an ingrate in the next room of their tiny flat, where he can hear every word.
Mom forbade television and snacks, but made room for adventures: trips to the country, baseball games, and summer baseball camp. As a teacher, Mom instilled the love of reading in her children. That and radio led Nicky to develop a loyalty to baseball and the Boston Red Sox that had been his maternal grandfather's and aunt's favorites. Nicholas adopted the Sox as more his own more than many fans do their teams. They were his family.
Nickolas spent the bulk of childhood in New Haven, Connecticut during the 1960-70s, witnessing the city's decline into ruined welfare projects, abandoned schools and factories, street prostitution, pedophiles, and widespread crime. This harsh backdrop hosts the neuroses of families of patients suffering SMDs and the book shows how long-lived these conditions all become.
Nickolas describes how he dealt with the injustices placed into his life by others' mental illnesses and family-based anxieties that create magical thinking, the need to control, and the drive to please a world of others in order to avoid attack. While some teens turned to TV heroes, Nicholas turned to the Red Sox and sports writing, becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Missouri-based brain research indicates the magnitude of damage done to children's neurology by parents with unsuccessfully untreated SMDs. Readers from middle school through adult can read The Crowd Sounds Happy to discover strong examples and solutions.
Armchair Interviews says: Powerful and well-written memoir from a child's point of view.
A Grand Slam in the "Growing Up with Baseball" genre June 2, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Among my all time favorites in the personal memoir about growing up with baseball are those of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Wilfrid Sheed. Nicholas DaWidoff's recent entry in this category has topped them all. It's not the usual "fathers playing catch with sons" story, for Dawidoff's parents were divorced and his father, suffering from mental illness, was an unsettling and sometimes looming presence on the fringe. This is an elegantly written and deeply moving account of a boy growing to manhood in the shadow of a broken family, coming to grips with it and learning to understand the heroic efforts of his mother to make things work. His own passion for and participation in baseball is not incidental, but is a primary source of solace and strength.
Fantastic narrative style June 1, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
A great book relating real-life to baseball fandom especially from the perspective of a teenaged youth! Nick Dawidoff has always had more than a way with words dating back before his college newspaper years and his descriptions actually transport you to his New Haven CT home and neighborhood with his single mom, sister, and classmates. An avid and long-suffering Red Sox fan, he describes the complexities of a simpler time, when one hung on the every syllable of the radio play-by-play announcer for the game details. Nonetheless, these diamond idols were a great preoccupation for a young man facing the severe mental illness of his father in the yet unrejuvenated New York City. In addition to his fantastic description, you may be occasionally running to your (unabridge) dictionary to enlighten your vocabulary, yet these words are used judiciously and knowledgeably, giving expanse to his autobiographical account. A truly enjoyable read! The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
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