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.

"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.'" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Before their recent autobiographical confessions, who would have suspected that so many writers of the late baby-boom generation had suffered through such bleak, desperate childhoods? It turns out that Jonathan Franzen spent his adolescence wallowing in self-disgust. The fatherless J.R. Moehringer found male companionship only in the local saloon. Sean Wilsey's theatrically narcissistic mother and... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) emotionally abusive stepmother sent him reeling into drugs and depression. Now, Nicholas Dawidoff, author of 'In the Country of Country,' has composed a painfully evocative memoir of a joyless youth in New Haven, Conn., his mentally disturbed father absent but perpetually looming. It makes me want to consider my own parents' acrid divorce as a creative impetus.

The narrative of 'The Crowd Sounds Happy' is unsettling but hardly unique. As Donald Dawidoff, a Washington-based attorney and author, declines into instability in the mid-1960s, his wife flees with their son and daughter. Money is tight and their household is cramped; she sleeps on a couch, while Nicholas occupies a semiprivate anteroom at the noisy nexus of the ground-floor apartment. He's a bright boy, and — though small and scrawny — a talented athlete, proud of his ability to scoop ground balls off any terrain regardless of how patchy or irregular. Still, he's unable to parlay those attributes into anything resembling popularity.

It sounds grim, and it is. But the crackle of Dawidoff's writing and his unstinting, if occasionally overbearing, sensitivity make his unfortunate journey compelling. Already keenly aware of the differences between himself and his peers — his lack of a proper and present male parent; the straitened financial circumstances that force his mother to substitute powdered milk for fresh; her stubborn unwillingness to allow television in the home — he chronicles each unkind nickname and mortifying incident. Most unsettling are the interactions with Donald, who moves to New York and grows increasingly erratic, by turns racist, crude, boorish and incoherent. 'Father's Day for me,' Dawidoff writes, 'was like Valentine's Day for the brokenhearted.'

Only adulthood can save him, but in the meantime baseball serves as a potent distraction. Introduced to the Mets by his mother's sister, he becomes a devoted fan and student of the game. 'I felt increasingly like a loner, and these men filled up my room,' he writes of the old-time players. 'I experienced a peculiar nostalgia for these distant days and distant games I had never lived through.' Eventually, he switches allegiances to the Red Sox. The epic quality of the team's disappointments gives Dawidoff a fresh perspective on his own. 'I felt oddly consoled by their pursuit of failure,' he says.

In rooting for Boston, he turns his back on the New York of his father; his pathological hatred of the Yankees, he understands with hindsight, is in large measure in loco parentis. Ted Williams, the legendary Red Sox star of a prior generation, becomes an idealized male substitute. 'Maybe I kept reading about Williams,' Dawidoff writes, 'because I couldn't do what I really wanted, which was to watch him play, and then be with him, have him tell me more stories, tell me that it would be all right in the end for me.' By high school, he's plodding through days in a fog, just waiting for Red Sox radio broadcasts at night. 'I did not feel fully alive until I had gone off to be with them and hear whatever story they had for me ... the present but nonexistent men I wanted around me to make up for the absent but existing father whom I no longer wanted at all, except in ways that he could not be.'

The most successful essays in the anthology 'Fathers & Sons & Sports' mine the same territory. Here, too, the paternal relationship is freighted with burdens that complicate the already difficult matter of male adolescence. 'I grew up a kid whose father left and who experienced his leaving as a death,' writes Paul Solotaroff in 'A Father's Small Hope,' an essay about his severely autistic son. 'Some holes you fill, and some you don't — not, at least, until you're a father yourself.'

Mike Winchell, a high school quarterback in an excerpt from Buzz Bissinger's 'Friday Night Lights,' uses football not only to come to grips with his father's premature passing, but also to validate the elder man's life. In 'Holy Ground,' sportswriter Wright Thompson tries to work through his father's demise while covering the Masters. 'Maybe I'll find those answers out here, at this place he loved so much. Is that crazy?' he wonders. 'Nothing seems crazy to me anymore.'

Like Dawidoff, they're longing for connection with fathers or sons who are unwilling or unable to connect. For them, sports serve less as a metaphor for real life than as a substitute, an orderly world in which box scores tally, standings brook no ambiguity, and even losers look forward to next year."

Reviewed by Bruce Schoenfeld, who is an author and journalist in Colorado, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"The Crowd Sounds Happy vividly captures the crosscurrents of a childhood at once unusually happy and unusually haunted. Dawidoff writes like an angel, and his memoir bids fair to join Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life on the short shelf of great books about American boyhood."

--Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

"This beautiful book is like a sharp knife--painful, gleaming and utterly precise."

--Joan Acocella, author of Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints

"A tender, exquisitely observed recollection of childhood, a failed and hurtful father, and hope."

--Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams

"A father-son-baseball story like no other. Dawidoff limns the double life of adolescence so acutely that I found myself wincing at least once a paragraph. I devoured and savored this beautifully written book, even as it broke my heart."

--George Howe Colt, author of The Big House

"I've never read a memoir whose author has remained truer to his boyhood self. The young Dawidoff who loved Ted Williams, Elvis Costello, and Samuel Johnson has grown up to write like an original amalgam of all three, and the result is an intricately recollected, uncommonly frank self-portrait with something terrific on page after page."

--Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of three previous books. The Fly Swatter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and In the Country of Country was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveler. He is also the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology A Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri and Berlin Prize Fellow, he is currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.