The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball [Hardcover]

Nicholas Dawidoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

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)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* In the nine-inning artifice of America’s national pastime, Dawidoff limns the only integrative pattern for a perplexed young man watching a father spin into madness, a mother sagging beneath twin burdens of grief and responsibility. Sport thus metamorphoses into profoundly personal metaphor in this piercingly candid memoir, probing the pain and pathos of a difficult passage into adulthood. A solicitous grandfather initiates an eight-year-old Dawidoff into the magic of a Mets game at Shea; yet, as an adolescent, he transfers his loyalties to the Red Sox, finding in their legacy of failure an imaginative complement to his own frustrations. As he regularly tunes his Chronomatic 9 clock radio to Sox games, this lonely teen forgets his personal distress—scornful peers’ taunting, his father’s latest outrage—by joining other Sox fans in irrational hope. Spectator longings solidify into real human ties when Dawidoff wins a place on his high-school baseball team, skill with a glove giving him a deeply cherished claim on a piece of the infield. In an epilogue, Dawidoff poignantly ponders his curiously enmeshed reaction to his father’s death in 1997 and to the Red Sox astonishing triumph in 2004. A reminder of how deeply sports still shape the American psyche. --Bryce Christensen

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 271 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375400281
• ISBN-13: 978-0375400285
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,006,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Loving the crowd, May 31, 2008

By 

Agent A "Agent A" (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball (Hardcover)

For me, this book is a picture of financial poverty and intellectual richness. What this broken family of three couldn't afford was plain as day to all of them, but the riches of language, of books, of words were flowing like so many rivers through their little cramped apartment, as if that was so normal. I love this book. There is a beauty in the way this not so interesting place comes into full color. ND is great at capturing his boyhood self. It makes me appreciate the details and undefined moments of my own childhood and alerts me to the overflowing otherness that my own children are likely experiencing in the world beside me.

Agent A

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars no switching teams as a fan, December 9, 2011

By 

Brian Maitland (Vancouver, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball (Hardcover)

Any sports fan knows there are a few rules you never ever break. Once you choose a fave team, you are stuck with that team for life. Only under certain conditions can you change fave teams as follows:
1. Your fave team folds.
2. Your fave team moves.
3. Your fave team changes its name (i.e., California Angels begat Anaheim Angels begat the LA Angels of Anaheim)

You can "fire" your fave team if you have a bad owner or they trade a fave player but that's all you can do. There's no switching to another team to cheer for.

The worst move is to switch allegiances and cheer for a team in a hated rival's city. No self-respecting Yankee-hating, Met-loving fan would ever cheer for any team from Boston except maybe if they were playing the Yankees.

Given that I could not take anything this author says seriously at all. Sorry, I just can't.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautifully Written, Painfully Honest Memoir, November 15, 2008

By 

W. C HALL (Newport, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball (Hardcover)

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