The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love and Madness in an American Family

This was a wonderful book. I'm a middle-aged woman (coincidentally Yankees fan), who has watched success and failure and misunderstanding in many areas of life. This is the kind of book I'll be giving or encouraging others to read, especially the men in my family, young and old, who are so hard to find something for - although this memoir is certainly not just for men and boys. Dawidoff grew up in New Haven with an absent father, a strong mother, family intelligence that in most situations creates high expectations - and he found baseball, and made it his obsession. But this isn't really just a book for fans of baseball. His memoir is filled with nuances and descriptions of his friends, family, and neighborhood, that so well illustrate his settings and experiences - and remind one of one's own similar experiences, but in words one could never quite express. That is why my pages are dog-eared. It is also full of empathy and confusion, self-doubt and self-awareness, growing pains, growing up, poignant moments that will make you smile. It is the whole package. Reading this would be, perhaps, also a salve for those who think that their families have had issues that others do not. Dawidoff was surrounded by some sage individuals in his life, and he soaked up their imparted wisdom, and has shared theirs, and his, with us.

Very highly recommended! A wonderful autobiography of a reclusive and self doubting young man from New Haven, Connecticut. Dawidoff grew up in a single parent household where money was tight, but he managed to survive and even thrive. The author's father was severely mentally ill, and a good part of the narrative focuses on the struggle to understand this strange man. Very good stuff.

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.

A gorgeously written, warm-hearted, and sincere study of childhood and its many wonders... both good (the mysteries of the backyard, the baseball field, young love, the adult world in general) and not so good (a family dealing with mental illness, the unguided quest for the masculine self). Dawidoff comes across as a sensitive soul in search of meaning -- which his stalwart mother creates through the idea of order -- and comfort, finding it in the simplest and thus most profound places. The story is compelling, the prose inspired.