The Crowd Sounds Happy

Starred review from March 31, 2008
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.”

Starred review from February 1, 2008
Dawidoff offers a superbly written elegiac memoir combining a child's love of baseball with an emerging understanding of the role mental illness plays in destroying love, life, and simple pleasures, notably radio broadcasts of Red Sox games serving to induce sleep as a fan's joy deflects the fears of childhood. Essential reading for anyone who wishes a balm for heartbreaks in youth, torn family life, love, and seventh-game losses.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2008
In the nine-inning artifice of Americas 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 distressscornful peers taunting, his fathers latest outrageby 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 fathers death in 1997 and to the Red Sox astonishing triumph in 2004. A reminder of how deeply sports still shape the American psyche.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)