A Grand Slam in the "Growing Up with Baseball" genre

books:


	• The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball Nicholas Dawidoff Pantheon, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fantastic narrative style

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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Loving the crowd

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

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Saved by the Red Sox

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.

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Powerful!

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.

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A Grand Slam in the "Growing Up with Baseball" genre

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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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