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

by Nicholas Dawidoff

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Biography, History

271 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Nicholas Dawidoff is the best-selling author of five books, including The Catcher Was a Spy and In the Country of Country. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has been a Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, and Art for Justice Fellow. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are only a few books I consider perfect: Tuck Everlasting, Book Thief, To Kill a Mockingbird, Search for Delicious...I'm not even sure I can describe perfect but I know it when I find it.

This is a perfect book.

It is a series of rememberings, both from the perspective of the age he was and from now. Woven in and out of the rememberings are baseball and his father. He never runs out of steam and the ending isn't happy because there isn't an ending.

This was also an incredibly important book because someone could read it and understand me as well. I understood me better. Even though many details of his life were different from mine, he described all sorts of things that are true, but so clearly and beautifully that I could see them there, read them a few times and feel as if someone completely understood me.

[Carla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoy well-written and perceptive memoirs especially when they have painful and hopeful revelations in equal measure. This book is a highly satisfying memoir that contains many wonderfully descriptive passages that capture the angst of growing up and feeling like an outsider. The author's life is colored by his father's mental illness, his mother's austere strength and determination and his love of baseball. The fact that he grew up in New Haven and graduated from Hopkins added to my interest. His mother is a former colleague and someone that I consider a significant mentor. Dawidoff's memoir multiplies my respect for her and reminds me to reflect back often on the parenting and teaching advice she gave me.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gorgeous book. It's about so much--baseball, family, obsessive fandom, dealing with the mental illness of a family member. The writer goes off on tangents that are all ultimately rewarding and interesting and, somehow, just right.

What can't be ignored is the writing--it's stunning.

[RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN · Rating 3 out of 5]

RICK “SHAQ” GOLDSTEIN SAYS: “A SAD SELF-REFLECTING LOOK OF ONES OWN LIFE IN A MIRROR”
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This memoir by Nicholas Dawidoff focuses on the author’s not too happy years from the age of three until his entry into college. His family moved to New Haven and when his parents divorced, his Father lived in New York. He came from a highly educated family as his Father, a lawyer had graduated from Harvard and Yale and his Mother was a school teacher. There are three recurring themes in young Nicholas’s life. 1) His Mother having very little money so they had to do without. 2) His Father’s degrading mental capacity 3) Nicholas’s love of baseball. In the early story telling you’re led through the eyes and mind of a child 3-6 years old, but on any attempt at a nostalgic trip down memory lane, the reader is so heavily burdened with excess verbiage, that if the reader were a union employee, they’d be demanding time-and-a-half. The author’s Mother does not allow a television in the house even when a relative gives one as a gift. So when Nicholas is growing up, a really unique situation develops; the worlds everyday culture is being created and evolving on TV, and without being able to learn any of the modern day “time-stamps” that the rest of society takes for granted, Nicholas has even more trouble fitting in. One such example is when he was at a friend’s house and there was a poster on the wall of a curvy blond in a red bathing suit, with wavy blonde hair. All the other guys gave her the proper attention, but Nicholas had no idea who Farah Fawcett of “Charlie’s Angels” was.
As early as the third page the author makes a very mean spirited comment about his Father’s mental capacity: “At a certain point my Father began talking to the squirrels, and he believed that even the dead ones were initiating conversations, communicating with him on urgent matters, instructing him when to strike, and whom.” Less powerful comments continue throughout the early going, but the reader isn’t given any real insight as to why for over one-hundred pages. To his Mother he says: “My friends don’t like to come over to my house because we don’t have a TV, we never have any snacks, and they don’t like how much you yell.” His only solace is listening to baseball games on his radio. First dedicating his loyalty to the New York Mets and then he switches to the Boston Red Sox for life. He portrays himself as a solitary mope, and the only thing he can depend on is being let down every year by the Red Sox. Not until the last twenty pages or so of the book does he shed any real light on his Father’s problems, and perhaps the most empathy towards his Father is shown after the story itself ends. Under the heading “SOURCE NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS” (And I must admit I normally don’t read these, but I happened to find something in there that caught my eye.) in small print after thanking about fifty people, on the third page, in the second to last paragraph he wrote: “WHEN I THINK NOW OF MY FATHER, DONALD DAWIDOFF, I REMEMBER WHAT DIETRICH BONHOEFFER WROTE FROM PRISON: “WE MUST FORM OUR ESTIMATE OF HUMAN BEINGS LESS FROM THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS AND FAILURES, AND MORE FROM THEIR SUFFERINGS.”

[Patti Abernathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not usually a fan of books about dysfunctional families but was led to this book after reading The Catcher was a Spy by the same author. At times I could relate to the sacrifices his mother made for the family but found his interactions with his father disturbing. I can not imagine what the years of this dysfunction must have been like. I also wondered what happened to Nick during his years at Harvard. I expected more baseball references but only at the end did I find something to ponder. Did baseball help you face emotional truths or was it a way of not confronting them?

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less baseball than I expected, but an introspective look at family dynamics and their complicated loyalties.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

My daughter Ryan says reading this book will help understand her, so I approached it a bit sideways, looking for what was Ryan more than just reading a book. I see why she was struck by the book. There is a lot of commonality – reading aloud, the Hardy Boys books, being poor and having a somewhat over-organized mother (the food shopping and freezing description was eerie), no TV, obsession with candy, even the scary parallels with the kidnapping of Jennifer and the Seattle kidnapping of Heidi (and Katherine being mistaken for Heidi three times as we walked home, but I don’t think Ryan would relate to that so much). I also noted that the author KNEW Eleanor Estes of the Moffats. The exploration of conforming/nonconforming was interesting too. I think I was modestly non-conforming; Ryan was from my vantage point wildly non-conforming; Katherine lived to conform. Of course, the overwhelming issue was the author’s relationship with his father; his desperate love and need for a father and then his need to get away from his father but at the same time his feeling of responsibility. I think Ryan also must have thought of her children and how they might respond to this book.

Even if this were not a near sacred book because of its importance to Ryan, I would have enjoyed reading it. The author writes beautifully and uses a wonderful vocabulary (yes, I had to look up some words and I always love it when that happens). He manages to look at childhood from his adult perspective, but still retain how he reacted and felt as a child – a difficult task.

Here are two of my favorite thoughts (there were others but I didn’t write them down). The first reminds me of my grandson: “Adolescence is life on the cusp. You crave options but none are forth coming because you’re not ready for them.”

The second reminds me of my recent experience at MLA: “Part of me wished they hadn’t liked me so late, when I didn’t need them any more.”

[Jeffrey Herrmann]

It took me like a month to slog through this. It’s a very sad story about his relationship with his mentally-ill father and the ways he attempts to compensate and cope with this trauma, partially through obsession with baseball and an intense identification with the Red Sox, a franchise marked by a history of epic loss, struggle, and tragedy. An expansion of a New Yorker article, the book is unrelenting in its effort to catalog every nastiness perpetrated by other teenagers and every self-lacerating thought he has. I also got tired of the big pretentious words, which instead of helping to better communicate his observations instead feels showy and preening. There’s a preciousness about the whole endeavor that I found tiresome. Also, the linkage between the Red Sox’s fate and his own felt labored and the ‘happy’ ending, with the Sox finally winning the World Series in 2004 and Dawidoff seemingly moving on following his father’s death, feels unearned. His mother is the most interesting character in the book—I wish he’d spent more time on her.

[Claire Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Father's crazy - suffering from schizophrenia or some similar malady, his mother, forced to raise him and his younger sister without any financial help from her ex-husband, guides her families austere existence. He's bullied in school and worries that he may wind up like his old man in Bonkerland. In other words, this is the childhood memoir we all would write if we hadn't forced ourselves to forget the gory details.

I bought the book because of the allusion to baseball in the title, but it wasn't about baseball all that much. It was a decent read. Some of us had it a lot worse that Nicholas Dawidoff, but no one seemed to care.

[Jennifer Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

The latest of my memoirs with baseball as the backdrop. I love how this is written, on the book jacket: "...moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature." This author's unbelievable detailed recollection of his childhood is impressive. First saw this book at Barnes and Noble, but actually got it through paperbackswap.com, a fabulous book exchange website.

[Leah Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finally finished this gift from my husband. I love baseball and memoirs, so it was a great idea. Ultimately, it was depressing and added to my already-maudlin mood, so I'm not sure I can recommend it. If you are looking for a fabulous baseball memoir, check out Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin, another thoughtful gift from my husband.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and moving memoir. Wistful in tone. I am struck by the honesty of the writing as the author confronts memories that are painful, embarassing, shameful, victorious, and loving. A portrait of an imperfect family in an imperfect world and a boy who grows in wisdom and mercy in front of our eyes.

[Meagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wasn't crazy about this book. It was in the sports section of Half Price Books but was definitely more of a coming of age story than a sports book. The author did not have an easy childhood, and while I felt for him, I just couldn't find myself engrossed in the story. I plugged through just to finish it.

[Sandie Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked it. the guy dealt with lots of heavy stuff. weird to think mental illness was still so taboo even in the 70s. the author got wayyyy to carried away with adjectives and way too many big words! I think it would have been fine with less

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, it's a baseball memoir....and also a memoir of growing up with a mentally ill father. He writes very, very well.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose in this book is gorgeous and evocative as Dawidoff describes his childhood of divorced parents, one of whom was mentally unbalanced. Just a wonderful memoir.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written memoir by the author of one of my favorite baseball books, The Catcher was a Spy.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and true. Proper grammar.

[Aaron Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is our bookclub book so I will withhold a critique until after bookclub.